Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra Review: Racing to the finish line

Samsung is jumping back into the high-end smartwatch fight with the new Galaxy Watch Ultra, but in my time with the device, the current design and the premium market it’s positioned for, feel at odds with one another. At its core, you get a better smartwatch than the Galaxy Watch 7, but the device itself feels full of design compromises that don’t make it feel like a premium smartwatch as much as a cheap knockoff.

Samsung is a company with great design chops. Over the years, it has created interesting products like Galaxy Buds Live, the Freestyle projector and, let’s not forget about the Flip and Fold models. Even the circular Galaxy Watch series has a great design that Samsung has honed over the past decade. I could mention tons more iconic Samsung designs, and while they’re not all for everyone’s tastes, they’re bespoke and show that the company is capable of so much more than following the footsteps of other companies.

This is my first time back on an Android smartwatch since Google and Samsung partnered to take Wear OS to the next level in 2021, and so far, it’s been a huge step up from what I experienced before. That said, Samsung’s tweaks to the system feel strange, considering what most people want a smartwatch for. Don’t get me wrong, Wear OS gets the job done, but like the early years of Android, Samsung’s skin on top of it still feels quite fragmented and a little backwards.

I should also mention that my review unit has been quite glitchy. Samsung says mine is “pre-production,” but they didn’t mention that until I brought up all my issues. Those include multiple setup attempts and subpar battery life. I only get around 20 hours from the unit, and other reviewers are getting more like 50-70 hours. On top of that, the watch bugs out if I try to play audio on my phone when it thinks I’m working out. However, if I tap on the workout notification, it just takes me to the now-playing interface. Beyond the reduced battery life, nothing has felt extremely detrimental to my time with the watch.

What makes the new watch ‘Ultra’ anyway

Samsung has slyly released two watch lines over the past few years: a regular sports-focused smartwatch and an often larger, more stylish version for the less sports-inclined. Both watch lines often have the same software but look slightly different. Notably, the larger watches even had a very popular rotating bezel design.

The new Ultra fits more with these offshoot watches that Samsung has traditionally angled toward business users. This year, it’s become more sporty after Apple proved that the high-end smartwatch market isn’t with business people but rather with high-performance athletes. Or at least positioning the watch as a tool for high-performance athletes may have been enough to make smartwatches a little cooler. That being said, instead of copying the idea of the watch, Samsung mostly copied the design of the watch, which, as I mentioned above, leaves it in a weird spot since it doesn’t feel overly premium on your wrist.

This watch has a larger screen and battery, a better speaker for an emergency siren, and a new orange button that lets you quickly activate a workout, flashlight, water lock, or stopwatch. (The water lock function just locks your screen to prevent accidental touches when swimming. It isn’t necessary to make the watch waterproof.) The new watch also has a water resistance rating for diving down 100 metres, a brighter 3,000 nit peak brightness, and Samsung’s latest 3nm smartwatch chipset. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the new ‘Titanium’ design, but I’ll discuss that later. These are all impressive features on paper, but for most users, the real draw is the larger screen and (potentially) longer battery life.

Once you start interacting with this watch in the real world, you realize that many of its perks are not as fully featured as they seem. For instance, Samsung’s marketing talks a lot about how this watch can dive down to 100m, but once you get to the fine print on the company’s website, it says that it was only tested at 100 meters for 10 minutes and “Galaxy Watch Ultra is not suitable for high-pressure water activities and diving. It may be used for shallow-water activities like swimming in a pool or ocean.” To further this, there’s no dive mode built into Samsung’s watch, unlike the Apple Watch Ultra.

In Samsung’s marketing, the Action Button appears to be metal. In real life, it’s plastic, it spins and does nothing. I should also mention that my watch calls it an ‘Action Button,’ but Samsung’s marketing calls it the ‘Quick Button.’

The ‘Action button’ is next on my list. I had initially set this button to open the flashlight, and since the watch has a 3,000-nit screen, it’s very useful if it’s dark out. That said, after a week or so of using the watch, the automatic workout tracking didn’t work great for biking. To remedy this, I decided to set the Action button to trigger a bike workout. Once you set it for a workout, the Action button also pauses your activity, and two quick presses will establish a lap time.

The Action button works well, but I don’t like where it’s placed. Since it’s front and centre, it feels like it should be your primary button for interacting with the watch, but instead, all it’s used for is mostly starting and stopping workouts. After using the watch for a while, I don’t really see what it does that another button on the Watch Ultra couldn’t. Two buttons already feel underutilized, so adding a third feels more like a rip-off than a smart addition. Adding more controls to the existing buttons on the watch might have gone a long way toward making all Samsung watches better instead of just making it feel like an Apple Watch copy.

You need to download three apps and a plugin to use this watch with a non-Samsung Android phone. (Samsung Wear + Galaxy Watch Plugin, Samsung Health and Samsung Smart Backup)

For example, if you double-tap, the top button is already set to open the workout page quickly. Samsung could have expanded this framework slightly so the double tap could do all the things (only three things) that the Samsung Action Button does. The lower button only functions as a back button, even though the other button always takes you back to the watch face, and you can swipe in from the left to go back. You can’t assign a hold or double press function to this button, leaving its usefulness quite low, and I found myself rarely touching it.

The larger screen is nice, but unfortunately, Samsung hasn’t done anything to take advantage of it. Two watch faces are exclusive to the Ultra, but neither is appealing compared to Samsung’s other faces. To make matters worse, the orange hue used on the watch face doesn’t match the orange buttons on my watch. This extends to most of the watch faces. None of them have a neon orange colour bright enough to match the Action button. I’ve gotten around this by using accent colours, like blue or green, but at the end of the day, this lack of forethought from Samsung feels really common as you poke around the smartwatch ecosystem.

The software side of things

As mentioned above, I found Samsung’s automatic workout-tracking pretty hit-and-miss. It rarely picked up my biking workouts, but it would notice that I was walking long distances and would start tracking that. However, on my 2km bike ride to my friend’s house, my Apple Watch usually tracks me automatically, while with the Galaxy Watch, I needed to use the Action Button every time. One caveat is that Samsung’s auto-pausing feature, which can stop the workout if you pop into a store to grab something or detect you’ve stopped working out, works really well.

You pretty much have to set a workout to the Action button or a watch face shortcut as well since navigating the Samsung watch to get to your workouts is more convoluted than I want it to be. First, open the Samsung Health app and then scroll down to workouts. From there, you need to scroll even further to get to exercises, and then once you open that, you need to scroll again to get to the workout you want. This is also where you’ll find the new multisport workout section, where you can chain up to three workouts together for triathlon training. This is a cool addition to the workout portfolio, but Samsung has decided to put it at the top of the workout list, even though I assume most users only do single-sport workouts.

It’s also annoying not to be able to ask Google Assistant on this watch to start a workout, so you need to use Bixby if you want to have that functionality, which is fine until you try to ask Bixby to control your smart home and then you realize you need a whole new smart home app to make that work. I also found the press-and-hold action to trigger the digital assistants not to work about half the time, requiring me to try again, which really slows down the effectiveness of an assistant.

Another thing that really annoyed me about Samsung’s implementation of Wear OS is its lack of a multitasking hardware button. Instead, you must open the app grid and select the Multitasking app before switching between open programs. This isn’t something that most people I know use, but when I’m camping, I like to be able to bounce between workouts and maps if I’m canoeing or hiking. Samsung’s implementation is a little backwards for situations like this. If I have to open the app drawer, why not just have all my open apps at the top of the drawer so I can simply click on them there? Opening the multitasking app and then choosing the one I want feels like a wasted click.

Another thing that threw me for a loop is how Samsung sets its smartwatches up by default to avoid notifications. For the first three days I was wearing this watch, I thought it was broken since I wasn’t getting any notifications. I even bought a Telegram client for the watch before diving in deep enough to realize that Samsung defaults to no notifications. You can turn them on with a few taps, but it’s strange to have to do this since notifications are one of the few things I think most people like about wearing a smartwatch. The Galaxy Watch 7 and Ultra were also smart enough not to give me double notifications, and if I was working on my phone or Chromebook, I wouldn’t get duplicates, which was a nice plus. It was strange and a little counterintuitive to set all this up myself.

Another issue I’ve run into is that, for some reason, my watch doesn’t want to connect to my Wi-Fi very often automatically. That means if I leave my phone (I’ve been using a Pixel 7 Pro and a OnePlus Open) in my office and walk into my living room, sometimes the watch disconnects from my phone until I manually connect the watch to Wi-Fi. Theoretically, it should do this independently, but my unit has been quite buggy, so that might be the problem, too.

Ok, let’s talk about the design

The new look was impressive at first and sat squarely on my wrist, but the more I wore it, the more annoyed I got by how cheap the overall design felt. First of all, Samsung has been staunchly building circular smartwatches for years, but for some reason, it decided to make this one a square. Yet, it still retains the circle display. Then, to try and blend that display into the watch’s body, the company tacked a chunky plastic bezel onto it, and it doesn’t even spin.

Alongside that, I think calling this ‘White Titanium’ is a bit misleading since the sides of the watch are plastic. I’ve seen a few other reviewers lament that they didn’t like the colours they tested but found the White to look the nicest. To that, I would say it looks cool at first, but after living with how bright it is and how cheap it ultimately looks, I don’t enjoy it on my wrist. When I look at this watch, it doesn’t scream titanium to me. The sides are plastic, and the obtrusively large bezel is also plastic, giving this watch a very plastic look.

Most of the titanium is actually on the bottom, where you never see it. Don’t get me wrong, at first glance, this watch looks cool, but the more you analyze it, the more it feels like something pretending to be high-end, not something that is.

As you can see here, the hands of the clock are a different shade of orange compared to the Action Button.

The worst part about wearing the Galaxy Watch Ultra is the poorly designed Marine band. For starters, it’s the main thing that makes this watch look like an Apple Watch, but Samsung’s design is hefty and quite rigid, making it uncomfortable to sleep in. It’s hard to get it to fit just right, too; it’s always too tight or too loose on my arms.

It’s also pretty brutal that Samsung only sells watches with this band. If you want one of the fabric ones (and you will), you need to buy the watch with the Marine band and then buy another separately ($134). I wouldn’t hate this if the Marine band were comfortable, but since it’s awful, it reduces how wearable the watch is out of the box.

It sadly gets worse since Samsung has designed a new watch strap connection method that looks a little like the Apple Watch version but functions differently and is not as well thought out. Samsung’s lugs load into the watch and stick straight out the sides, creating pretty hefty gaps between your wrist and the band. On the other hand, Apple angles its lugs downwards to help all bands wrap around your wrist more naturally.