Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 Classic: initial thoughts
Last Friday I replaced my old smartwatch with a Galaxy Watch 8 Classic. I've had it now for just under a week, but I feel that's enough time for some initial thoughts about the device.
Form factor
I love the look and feel of this watch. When this latest iteration of the Galaxy Watch lineup was launched (starting with the 6 Ultra I think), it had a strange-looking form: a round watch face & dial on top of a square-ish (squircle?) frame. The classic continues this form with the round watch face on top of the rounded square frame.
It doesn't look out of place though! Obviously this thing needs more room to fit all the sensors it has, but Samsung managed to still make it look like a watch. That's one of the few gripes I have about the Apple Watch - I don't want to wear a rectangle on my wrist.
The rotating dial is amazing and I've loved it since my Galaxy Gear S3. I believe the Classic line is the only watch that has the rotating dial - I really recommend it. Not only does it make navigating the watch "fun", but it's very satisfying as a fidget tool.
The buttons - and there are three of them now - are solid. They're not too easy to press, thus avoiding accidental activation, but you also don't need to jam them down to get them to work.
Overall this thing is solid but doesn't feel heavy on my wrist; it feels about the same as what I was wearing before (Galaxy Watch 46MM).
Battery life
All tech seems to live or die by its battery life. If the watch loses power too fast, what's the point in wearing it if it's going to die in a few hours of use?
Thankfully the battery life on the 8 Classic seems to be pretty good. When I first got the watch I had everything turned on: all the sensors, Always On Display; the charge didn't last very long, but it was still good for a whole day. My charging habits negate this anyway, as I usually charge my watch before bed and then again in the morning while I get ready for work.
The watch charger also works incredibly fast. I can't give you specifics but it's significantly less than an hour to get from near-empty to 100%.
But I wanted to see how long I could actually use this watch without charging it. I ran a little experiment and I'm very pleased with the results.
A couple of notes:
- Always On Display is turned OFF
- All sensors are active, including continuous heart rate monitoring & stress monitoring
I started the experiment Tuesday morning and officially ended it this morning (Thursday). I noted what time I started with the watch at 100% and noted down random intervals on each day. I charged it Tuesday morning and did not charge it again until this morning.
| Day | Time | Battery % |
|---|---|---|
| Tues Feb 3 | 7:11am | 100% |
| Tues Feb 3 | 4:05pm | 90% |
| Tues Feb 3 | 9:45pm | 80% |
| Wed Feb 4 | 8:20am | 60% |
| Wed Feb 4 | 2:45pm | 48% |
| Wed Feb 4 | 9:45pm | 29% |
| Thurs Feb 5 | 6:10am | 12% |
I would never get that much life from my old watch unless I turned on battery saver settings or adjusted my sensors. That's two full days, and I probably could have gotten a little more out of it this morning before letting it die.
One thing I need to explore is the "battery protection" setting which charges it to 90%, then stops, and starts again when it hits 85%. Specifically I want to know if this is A Thing that works or if it's superstitious mumbo jumbo.
Software
The hardware is great, but how is the software? Samsung's watches run on their version of WearOS, which, like their phone OS, is called OneUI. I don't know what number it is on the watches, but whatever. It's a good combo, and leaps and bounds above their Tizen OS (which was still pretty good!). It can get confusing sometimes when I try to use the dial to navigate and it goes a different direction than I meant but that's a muscle memory thing.
The watch is very smooth. So was the Galaxy Watch - I'd say the two watches are on par with each other. I like the OneUI/WearOS experience, it's a welcome improvement. Not all of my phone apps have a watch equivalent, but one of them that does is Today Weather - I love that on my phone, so I'm using that on my current watch face.
One of the new buttons on the watch is an "action" button, a smaller circle between the Home and Back buttons that you can use to launch something. I'm disappointed that you're limited arbitrarily to a small selection of functions. I would like to set it to Google Wallet, but that's not on the list; my next choice would be the Timer, but that's not on the list either. The stopwatch is, but not the timer. I don't get that. I've set it to launch my exercises so that'll have to do.
Speaking of Google Wallet - I was concerned that the watch would only have support for Samsung Wallet, which I don't use. But Google Wallet is available! And it has ALL passes. Tapping to pay doesn't work on all machines, but it does for most.
Oh, and for reading received messages - I can view more of the messages as previews than I could before. I guess there were limitations with what the old Galaxy Watch could interpret. But now I can see images in a message, which is kind of neat.
Health features
I mentioned earlier that I have all the sensors turned on. I mean, why not? There are a bevy of new sensors I didn't have before, and they all lead to some more accurate / detailed sleep data. But another cool thing is that the Home and Back buttons also act as sensors for reading your body composition and doing an ECG.
You can also take your blood pressure, but you need a real blood pressure monitor to calibrate the watch - we have one, but I haven't taken the time to do the calibration.
Now, all of this data is going to be a bit suspect. A single watch can't match dedicated tools. But if you're only using one tool to measure things, your measurements are accurate to that tool - so you at least have a frame of reference. It's like the scale - maybe your bathroom scale is not calibrated "correctly" and your weight shows differently on another scale somewhere. But if you're using that same scale every day, you can still measure your progress.
Anyway, this new watch unlocked a ton of new things in Samsung Health. I'm still going through all of the bells and whistles but I feel reinvigorated when it comes to using the health watch features to monitor things. At this stage I'm more interested to see what my watch interprets than using the data to make significant changes.
I definitely appreciate the more detailed sleep statistics; so far they match how I've felt about my last few sleeps (I have a cold so my sleep hasn't been great - and it shows in my stats).
Overall
If you're interested in a smartwatch I would recommend this one. I think it works for iOS devices but it's optimized for Android, unsurprisingly. There were other recommendations I looked at - AmazFit, Garmin - but I decided to stay within the Samsung ecosystem since that means not having to change too many aspects of my routine.