Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 review: More of the same

For years, Samsung has been right at the top of the smartwatch pile, delivering the most easy-to-recommend smartwatches for Android phone users, thanks to a combination of great features, competitive prices and durable build. The latest series seeks to raise the level, but does it do enough to improve on the last generation, or is it more of the same?

Design

• 40mm and 44mm case sizes – Armour Aluminium – 28.7g or 33.3g
• Graphite, silver and gold colours options
• Sapphire crystal glass – 5ATM/1P68 water and dust resistance – MIL-STD-810H

Speaking in broad strokes, it’s tough to see much change in the Galaxy Watch 6 series from a design perspective. The aluminium casing looks practically identical to the casing on the Galaxy Watch 5 from last year, which is like the Watch 4 from the year before.

That’s to say, it’s quite a basic, simple design featuring a completely flat screen, and an aluminium frame that slopes down seamlessly into the strap lugs and features just two physical buttons: both rectangular and placed on the right edge of the watch.

While changes aren’t obvious, there are a couple that could make at least some difference, and improve the experience over the previous models. First is the thinness of the bezels around the display. Samsung has shrunk the bezel and fit it in a larger display without increasing the size of the watch itself.

Second is the new mechanism for removing and attaching the watch bands and straps. Rather than have a fiddly catch, it’s got a single rectangular button that’s easy to press, and that releases the strap.

Samsung hopes this will increase willingness among buyers to chop and change the Galaxy Watch 6 bands more frequently, undoubtedly also hoping this means it sells more of those different first-party styles and colours. Of which, there are many more new materials and designs this year.

The only problem is, while it is much easier to remove, getting it back in position again can still be really fiddly since you’re still working with trying to fit a tiny pin in a little dimple on the inside of the lugs.

Otherwise, it’s much as it was before. The so-called Armour Aluminium offers toughness, but without the weight that’d come from stainless steel.

It comes in two sizes – just like the Galaxy Watch 5 did – so you have either 40mm or 44mm diameters, neither of which feels bulky or dominating on the wrist. At 28.7g and 33.3g respectively, the watch bodies are very light, making them ideal for wearing all day every day, and during activities, when you don’t want to feel that you’re wearing a watch.

I tested the smaller model for this review, and just like the last model was impressed with how little I could feel it was there. It’s super lightweight, and just gets out of the way. I do find the design a little bit plain and dull, but it’s simple, clean and not flash, and that’s what a lot of people want from a fitness device.

As for overall durability, it’s looking good here. There’s sapphire crystal glass on the top, making it really scratch and impact-resistant. It’s waterproof to depths of 50 metres, dust resistant and military-graded for shock/impact. In short: despite being light, it should more than cope with your daily scuffs, bangs and adventures in the rain.

So far it’s lived up to those expectations. I’ve tested it in the rain, during some sweaty workouts and took it scrambling across rocks at the base of an epic coastal cliff side. It got banged a bit at various points of my testing, including against the side of a kettlebell during workouts, and so far there’s no sign of scratching or marking anywhere on the watch. It’s life-proof.

Display and software

• 1.3-inch AMOLED – 432 x 432 resolution display (40mm)
• 1.5-inch AMOLED – 480 x 480 resolution display (44mm)
• Wear OS 4 with One UI 5 Watch skin

The new, larger displays were the first thing I noticed on the latest version of Samsung’s smartwatch series. As mentioned, the display size has increased without adding any bulk to the watch. This big, expansive AMOLED panel really pops out at you from the new watches.

By reducing what was quite a prominent bezel in the Galaxy Watch 5, Samsung made sure the screen is what grabs your attention on the Watch 6, particularly on the smaller 40mm model where the thicker bezel was more obstructive.

Increasing display size doesn’t just make the watch nicer looking though, it’s about giving more space for detail and data, and giving you more space to swipe your finger and tap. It not only makes it easier to read but easier to interact with, so it’s a very welcome upgrade even if it is – arguably – the only upgrade you’ll notice.

It’s the same screen – or screens – on both the regular Galaxy Watch 6 and Galaxy Watch 6 Classic this year, which means 1.3-inches on the smaller model and 1.5-inches on the larger one. It’s sharp and clear, and easy to read in pretty much any condition, even bright daylight.

You get always-on functionality as is usual with AMOLED watch panels, although that will reduce your battery life somewhat if you have it activated.

As for software, this is the latest version of Samsung-powered Wear OS. In this instance, it’s Wear OS 4, and runs with OneUI 5 for watches on top. That means a combination of Samsung features like Samsung Pay/Wallet and Bixby with all the services and features you’d expect in a Wear OS watch.

You’ll get access to all the apps on the Play Store, including the recently announced official WhatsApp for Android wearables.

Fitness and health

• BioActive sensor – HR, ECG, sleep, activity and temperature
• Body composition measurements
• Running posture and gait sensing

Fitness tracking improvements have been made too, with the watch now capable of more in-depth sleep tracking and – for those who want it – sleep coaching. If it notices inconsistencies in your sleep quality, it can give you advice on how to improve your nightly rest (more on that later).

There’s a temperature sensor as well, giving additional intelligence to monthly menstrual cycle data and advice. Using it, the watch can tell you when your fertile window is, when you’re ovulating, when your period is due, and monitors it all, displaying the data in an easy-to-read graphic.

Of course, it does the usual, like tracking your heart rate all day, your SpO2 (blood oxygen saturation) and – this year – will allow you to customise your heart-rate profile. In use, the idea is that you perform intense exercise over a period of days, it gets a sense of your maximum heart rate based on that, and can then use that data to work out your individual heart-rate zones.

It’s a personalisation that could be really important for anyone with specific fitness goals. It’ll ensure you’re not working too hard, and can use your effort and heart-rate to determine the kind of workouts and activities you need to increase fitness, and performance and get healthier (if that’s your goal).

The experience of actually tracking health and activities is solid. You can track all manner of activities with it. I tested it doing both low-intensity and high-intensity activities, but it’s safe to say Samsung still has a little work to do on the speed and responsiveness of the heart-rate sensor.

Comparing it alongside a couple of other watches while doing kettlebell sessions, it seemed consistently 10bpm below what my Apple Watch and Huawei Watch showed at those peaks. Or – more accurately – it seemed to take a few seconds to register those higher peaks.

As an example – where my other watches would read around 158-160bpm at my peak heart rate, the Samsung showed 148-150 and only catching up just as I was stopping to recover between sets.

The good news, however, is that it’s no longer a case of having to wait 5-10 minutes for the watch to register higher heart-rate readings. It’s a lot more responsive than some of the older models were. It was only slightly less responsive than other manufacturer watches, and so meant the average heart-rate reading over the course of an activity was only a bit lower. It was – at least – consistent with itself.

There’s so much more to Samsung’s system than just pure reliability or data though. With the watch and Samsung Health combined, the company is attempting to build a holistic, fully featured fitness and health offering, and serving up experiences tailored to all users.

If you’re a runner, and you’re looking to improve your form, you get advanced sensor data that can detect if your gait and running style is efficient, or you can run alongside a virtual coach to improve performance.

If your main aim is to lose body fat and gain muscle, you can use the body composition feature on the watch to measure how much of your mass is made up of skeletal muscle, fat and water. If – like me – your exercise efforts are centered around getting stronger and more balanced, this can be handy to know that your work is paying off. Of course, you can feel those changes over time, but it’s nice to get the data supporting those perceptions.

You get access to a whole selection of workouts and plans for different intentions too, whether it is just being more active, getting stronger, or building endurance. Samsung ties its fitness app in with a number of third parties to offer videos and plans, including introductory offers to services like Fiit to really get you going on your fitness journey.

Sleep tracking champ

• Sleep stage tracking
• Personalised coaching and habit-building
• Snore detection

Along with the more personalised efforts on the fitness side, there’s an enhanced sleep coaching tool. It’s part gimmick – in that it assigns you an animal based on your sleeping style – but also, part actually useful.

This sleep coaching/analysis doesn’t just work from one night’s sleep, so it’s something you do need to stick with for a while so that it gets accurate data for you. Initially, you need to have worn the watch for nine days so that it’s got enough weekday data and enough weekend data to understand what your pattern is during work time, and off work time.

Once it’s done that, it takes all those data points and analyses the sleep time, wake time, deep sleep, light sleep and REM sleep to figure out how well you sleep generally. Once it assigns you a ‘sleep animal’ it’ll give you an easy, quite pithy paragraph on how that animal sleeps and why it’s like you.

For me, that animal is apparently a lion, and not just because of my long bushy mane or my consistent, all-night Mufasa-roar-like snoring sounds. (Which, by the way, it records all instances of during the night if you place your Galaxy phone on your bedside as you sleep. There’s nothing quite as eye-opening as checking your sleep data from the night before and finding 2 hours and 14 minutes of snoring recorded all through the night.)

It detected my sleep is a healthy, consistent pattern with very little difference between weekend and weekday sleeping. Apparently, that consistence and length means I’m like a lion. The interesting bit comes after it’s worked out what ‘animal’ you are. You can start a coaching plan with tips for maintaining and improving sleep consistency.

Using it you can glance through a checklist of good habits. For me – checking I woke up at 7:30 am consistently was one, being active through the day another and not eating too late or right before bed another.

Performance and battery

• Exynos W930 chipset – 2GB RAM – 16GB storage
• Up to 40 hours battery – Wireless/magnetic charging

With internal components and overall product performance, the sense is that Samsung has tweaked things slightly and increased the power and speed to make it a more fluid and responsive watch.

Spec-wise, there’s a new Exynos W930 inside which is said to deliver almost 20 per cent more power than the chip inside the Galaxy Watch 5, and Samsung has upped the RAM from 1.5GB to 2GB, with the aim to make running apps and activities smoother. It’s joined by 16GB storage for downloading apps and music.

It didn’t always feel super speedy and snappy, but it wasn’t laggy or slow at all. It seemed there was a little stutter when going from a static watchface to swiping through the interface, but once it work up, it was quick and smooth for the most part.

On the battery life front, Samsung suggests you could see up to 40 hours of use from the watch if you leave the always-on display switched off. With always-on enabled you’ll get about 30 hours.

In my testing, it wasn’t far off being accurate. On quieter days without any intense fitness activity being tracked, and with notifications kept to a minimum, we could comfortably reach the end of a full day with around 30 per cent of the battery left, and that’s with the always-on display enabled.

Because I wanted to test the sleep analysis feature, what usually happened was I’d dock it on its magnetic charging cable in the evening before bed, then put the watch on at bedtime and then wear it until roughly the same time the following day.

I never once had the fear that it would run out of juice on any day, unless I’d forgotten to charge it one evening. Even then, it’s a relatively fast charge, so I wasn’t left waiting that long when it did empty. In fact, half an hour docked on its charger can mean about half a battery refill, and after an hour you’ve got more than enough to see you through a day. It takes about 90 minutes to do a completely full charge.

It’s worth noting, this is with the smaller model that has the lowest battery capacity, I suspect the larger models might take a bit longer.

Verdict

Samsung consistently delivers some of the best all-round smartwatches for Android users, and the Galaxy Watch 6 is no different. It may not represent massive changes over its 2022 predecessor, but it offers a compelling feature list in an attractive, lightweight package that’ll slot into your daily life, regardless of what you’re trying to get out of it.

The skinnier bezels mean more space for the screen, and the watch retains its waterproofing and adds sapphire crystal glass to the outside, so it’s more durable and more useful than it’s ever been. Add to that a swathe of fitness tracking and health features, plus popular third party exercise service tie-ins, and you get a fantastic fitness device as well as a great smartwatch. Plus, it will easily last you a full day on a charge, and then refill quickly when empty. What’s not to like?

With a more elegant design, iPhone support and more clear improvements over the Galaxy Watch 5 it would be a world-beater. As it is, it’s a very solid, reliable and safe option.