In addition to releasing the Galaxy Z Flip4 and Z Fold4, Samsung also released the Galaxy Watch5. Now, to those who are in the loop, you might say – hey, this is identical to the Galaxy Watch4 series. And you’re right – kind of.
The Galaxy Watch5 series also comes with 40mm and 44mm sizes for us to choose from, but in a few different color choices than before. The one we have here is the Galaxy Watch5 44mm version and let’s compare it with the Galaxy Watch4 44mm that I was wearing for the past year.
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Okay, let’s run through the similarities between these two watches. Given that these two watches are 44mm, they share a lot of the same hardware. They both look identical and share the same 20mm width watch strap with the exact same locking mechanism.
They also use the same 1.4-inch circular Super AMOLED screen with 450×450 pixels too. One big upgrade though is that the Galaxy Watch5 now uses a sapphire crystal glass instead of Corning Gorilla Glass.
The chipset of the device also remains the same – Exynos W920 and all of the other core specs remain the same. One thing that has changed is the sensor underneath the watch. We now have one little dot here which is supposed to be the infrared skin temperature sensor, but unfortunately, that feature has not been enabled yet. Even Samsung Health doesn’t have that option to display skin temperature too.
One big upgrade over the previous generation is actually the charging cable. I immediately realized that Samsung upgraded everything to USB-C this year but that’s not the only thing they upgraded.
The power output of the charger has also increased to 5V 2A. I tried reading somewhere around the magnetic puck itself but whoop – they printed it on the cable. The magnetic puck is also smaller this time, by the way.
Now, I’m not particularly concerned about the charging time but I’m concerned about the battery life. Samsung said that the battery capacity is now 13% larger than before. Given that everything else regarding the Galaxy Watch5 is the same as the Galaxy Watch4, then the battery life will be only gauging the impact of the increased battery capacity.
So, I used it the same way as how I did on the Galaxy Watch4 – and that 13% larger battery capacity definitely makes the Galaxy Watch5 go past the 2-day usage mark before it runs completely flat. Here are some of the data I recorded:
- Charge #1
- Started using on Friday at 3pm, returned charging on Sunday at 7.30pm with 10% left
- Charge #2
- Started using on Monday at 12am, returned charging on Tuesday at 9pm with 21% left
- Charge #3
- Started using on Tuesday at 12am, returned charging on Thurday at 10pm with 24% left
The Galaxy Watch5 still supports wireless charging so you can convert your Galaxy smartphone into a smartwatch charger via the Wireless PowerShare. Or… you can plug in the watch’s wireless charging puck into the phone. I didn’t expect this will work – but it did.
As for the software side of things, I’m going to briefly run you through here. It’s pretty much identical to before. There are two apps that you need to install – the Samsung Wearables app to set up the watch when you first unbox it – and within this app, we do have quite a lot of settings to customize.
If you don’t want to customize using the Samsung Wearables app, you can do the exact same customizations on the watch directly. I find it a bit awkward if we want to configure it directly on the watch directly – but hey, it works.
The second app is Samsung Health. It is here that we get a dashboard of all the health data gathered by the Galaxy Watch5. We have all the same types of health tracking features that the Galaxy Watch4 offers, so nothing special here. Again as a quick reminder – the skin temperature sensor is not enabled yet so there is no data shown on Samsung Health yet.
The health tracking – as far as I can see – performs the same as the Galaxy Watch4. We still have the usual health tracking like the body composition analysis, sleep analysis, all of those things – but we Malaysians still do not have ECG or blood pressure monitoring. Quite sad, honestly. I’ve been waiting for that feature for 3 years.
We have no idea what’s the holdup but we consistently asked Samsung Malaysia about this – and they also do not have any ETA for us.
Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy Watch5 44mm?
And finally – the price hike. Last year, we regarded the Samsung Galaxy Watch4 series as the best smartwatch money can buy, and yet it’s actually the cheapest, most advanced Google Wear OS 3.0 smartwatch. It’s running Wear OS 3.5 now, actually.
This year, the Galaxy Watch5 is with the same sentiment. It’s still the most advanced Wear OS smartwatch but got a price increment of RM200. This Galaxy Watch5 44mm is at RM1,199 and that’s a 20% price increment over the Galaxy Watch4 44mm.
That might sound like a tough pill to swallow but there are no other new smartwatches using Wear OS 3.0 or above. Seriously, it’s still the best smartwatch money can buy despite the price bump.
By the way, accessories from the Galaxy Watch4 44mm fit perfectly on the Galaxy Watch5 44mm.
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