Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra Review: Heavy Duty Watch, Heavy Duty Price

The Galaxy Watch Ultra is a premium-priced durable smartwatch suitable for multi-sport athletes — but it’s not going to be the right smart wearable for everyone.

Pros	Cons
Distinctive style	Expensive
Very bright display works superbly outdoors	WHERE IS MY ROTATING BEZEL SAMSUNG?
Largest battery of any Galaxy wearable	Lower battery life than some competing Android wear devices

Score: 3/5

	Buy The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra!	Buy On Amazon

In this review

Galaxy Watch Ultra Specifications
Galaxy Watch Ultra Design
Galaxy Watch Ultra Performance
Galaxy Watch Ultra Battery
Galaxy Watch Ultra Conclusion

Samsung’s latest premium smartwatch is pitched as an ultra-durable, enthusiast athlete smart timepiece – and there’s a rather direct pachyderm in the pavilion that I feel like I should address upfront.

Is the Galaxy Watch Ultra a shameless Apple Watch Ultra clone?

To a certain extent yes – while Samsung can lay claim to a little prior art in terms of using “Ultra” in product branding, it’s pretty clear that it’s taking on the Apple Watch Ultra in terms of tech enthusiasts’ attention with that branding, and to a certain extent as well the style of the device.

However – and this is really critical – nearly none of that matters unless you own Apple or Samsung shares, really.

Why?

Simply because the Apple Watch Ultra will only work with iPhones, and the Galaxy Watch Ultra will only work with Android phones.

Nobody’s mixing and matching, so while comparisons might be good for lighting up Internet flame wars, from a practical perspective unless you’re so cashed up the money doesn’t matter, you’re only going to buy the one of them.

This review isn’t going to focus in on those comparisons (with one small exception, which you’ll see coming), because the Android phone buying market isn’t buying Apple Watches, and vice versa.

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That elephant out of the way, the Galaxy Watch Ultra is a visually striking timepiece with a lot of potential appeal to serious athletes.

I can’t claim to be a multi-sport athlete – and as my knees keep reminding me, I’m not getting any younger – and while I can see the appeal, it’s also clear this is Samsung’s first crack at this premium market, and there’s some serious room for refinement and improvement.

Design

Samsung sells the Galaxy Watch Ultra in three different Titanium hues; either Titanium Silver, Titanium White or Titanium Grey, which is what I’ve tested with. The Galaxy Watch Ultra only comes in one physical size, 47mm, which means it sort-of matches up to last year’s Galaxy Watch 6 Classic – almost.

I loved the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic’s design a whole lot, largely because it features Samsung’s single best design idea for wearables, the rotating bezel. Guess what’s not on the Galaxy Watch Ultra?

You do get Samsung’s “virtual” bezel, which allows you to slide your finger around the inside of the screen for slightly-too-fast scrolling between tiles, but it’s not the same thing in any way at all. I 100% do not get why Samsung doesn’t play to its strengths and put the rotating bezel on all of its premium wearables every single year, and especially when it’s launching a new, seriously expensive premium smartwatch – but here we are.

While it’s irritatingly lacking in the rotating bezel, outside the touchscreen you also get three side buttons for quick return to home at the top, a rotating button that by default launches Samsung’s exercise app and a bottom button for stepping backwards through watch screens.

Each button is mappable to other functions if those don’t suit you, though not in every case and scenario; for example the top “Home” button’s “press and hold” function by default launches Bixby, but can be remapped to either Google Assistant only or a power menu. Naturally, Bixby lasted no longer than it took for me to find that feature and remap it.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra’s 47mm body is large on my wrist – there’s no petite size on offer – though that doesn’t equate exactly to a huge display screen, measuring in as a 1.5mm “squircle” (help me, I’m having Nokia flashbacks again at the mention of that word) with a resolution of 480x480. So while it looks kind of square, it actually presents as a circle, and a very bright one at that. Maximum brightness is rated at 3,000 nits, which means that it’s very well suited for outdoor activities even in the brightest sunlight – and in a pinch, as a wrist-mounted flashlight too.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra is (effectively) a new line for Samsung, and that means it features a new range of bands, attached with a very simple unlock button built into each end of the watch. It works quite nicely, and certainly a whole lot easier than, for example, Google Pixel Watch bands with their fiddly connection mechanisms.

Samsung already has Galaxy Wearables in market – this year’s other choice is the Galaxy Watch 7 – and what’s meant to make the Galaxy Watch Ultra stand out is its extreme durability. The titanium body should stand up to some serious wear and tear – no, I haven’t run over it with a bulldozer, see here for why that would be a dumb test – as should its sapphire glass front display. No concerns here during my review period, but again, I’ve not taken it on a Paris-Dakar run or up Everest either.

In terms of water resistance, it is rated as IP68 (see here for my water resistance explainer) with support for up to 10ATM pressure, AKA 100 metres of water resistance… with some pretty serious caveats at play.

Remember when I said I was only going to compare the Galaxy Watch Ultra with the Apple Watch Ultra once? This is that one time, because you might be tempted to think that the Galaxy Watch Ultra is a diver’s watch, similar to the Apple Watch Ultra.

It isn’t, so if that’s important to you, look elsewhere. Samsung’s specifications for the Galaxy Watch Ultra do list that 100m figure and you might think – especially as I’ve not gone diving with the Galaxy Watch Ultra – that I’m complaining without cause, but I’ll quote here in full Samsung’s annotated notes on that precise 100m figure:

Galaxy Watch Ultra is water resistant for 10 minutes in water with a depth of 100 meters according to the ISO22810 standard. The test was conducted in 5% salty water and 4ppm chlorine water. Galaxy Watch Ultra is water resistant with an IP68 rating based on the lab test conditions for submersion in up to 1.5 meters fresh water for up to 30 minutes. It 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.
Not advised for beach or pool use.

If anyone can make sense of how it’s good for “swimming in a pool or ocean” but isn’t advised for beach or pool use on this planet, I’m all ears.

Performance

The Galaxy Watch Ultra is built around Samsung’s own Exynos W1000 processor with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage.

It’s a WearOS device with Samsung’s own OneUI sitting on top of it, which means that you get the full WearOS experience with a slew of Samsung’s own tracking features, Bixby (sigh) and functions that Samsung’s had for a while, like its cute sleep tracking animals.

WearOS apps run slickly on the W1000, though there’s no real way to benchmark that in a real fashion against the Qualcomm W5 Gen 1. The W1000 is a 3nm chip, so it should be faster, but the practical reality of using WearOS apps is that you really only notice speed when it’s lacking – and that hasn’t been an issue for the W1000 during my review period.

The issue here, I think is that while it’s a good WearOS watch, that’s true for most modern WearOS watches, and there’s not much here that makes me think that it’s worth spending the $1,299 that Samsung wants for the Galaxy Watch Ultra if WearOS is all you’re after.

On the fitness side, Samsung says that the new and improved sensors on the Galaxy Watch Ultra are even more accurate than in prior models for essential health functions, matched up with dual GPS for more precise outdoor tracking. There’s also support for blood pressure monitoring, but this isn’t via an included pressure cuff (a la the Huawei Watch D); instead it works with your existing blood pressure cuff to capture those measurements… at which point I wonder why you wouldn’t just use your existing cuff normally.

While I don’t have a clone me to put to the test for full comparative testing (damn, that would be handy), general health tracking has mostly been good during my review period.

Like prior Samsung smart wearables, the Galaxy Watch Ultra will pick up if you’re exercising and start the appropriate mode a few minutes into your exertions if you do forget, though it’s not always 100% accurate at picking precise distances if you do so.

Setting off on my regular 5km walk – a trail whose distance I’m super familiar with, having run it literally hundreds of times now – and deliberately waiting for the Galaxy Watch Ultra to pick up that I was running, I found it off by between 50m to 200m for most of those kinds of runs. It’s good if you want basic exercise tracking and you’re forgetful so as to not lose those metrics entirely, but you’re still going to be better off deliberately starting your exercises outright.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra also offers a multi-sport tracking system that lets you pick from a range of activities for your own personal triathlons. Neat if you need it, not my style for sure and I did note that it’s built essentially around classic triathlon exercises, not everything the Galaxy Watch Ultra says it can track.

If you’ve ever dreamed of a triathlon that combines American Football, Ballet and Hang Gliding, you’re (a)A very weird individual and (b) going to have to keep on dreaming.

Mind you, with the Olympics on right now, while I’m generally disinterested in sports, I’d watch the heck out of that combination for the giggles – who wouldn’t?

Sleep tracking is a feature I’ve often found to be a little hit-and-miss on most smartwatches, and the Galaxy Watch Ultra wasn’t much better or worse than any other smart wearable I’ve tested in this regard, sometimes missing out on periods overnight when I was awake entirely.

I’m also not a big fan of wearing these larger smartwatches to bed, because their chunky nature means they catch on bedsheets more easily, keeping me awake when I’m trying to drift off. It wasn’t a surprise to me at all that the Galaxy Watch Ultra generally wanted me to get more sleep.

If I don’t want to sleep at all, perhaps because I’m worried about the boogeyman coming to get me, the Galaxy Watch Ultra does include a VERY LOUD siren that’s activated with a long press of the central quick button. Good for emergencies no doubt, though I’d probably take it off my wrist if I had to activate it, because it really is THAT LOUD.

Battery

The larger body of the Galaxy Watch Ultra does give it more room for batteries, and Samsung certainly hasn’t skimped in this regard, packing in a 590mAh battery. That’s larger than the battery in the Galaxy Watch 7, or even the similarly sized Galaxy Watch 6 Classic, both of which pack in a 425mAh power pack.

There’s size, and as they say in the hoariest old euphemistic jokes, there’s what you do with it, and here my experiences with the Galaxy Watch Ultra have been quite mixed.

At best, without dipping into extreme battery saving measures – not a bad option to have, but why buy a $1,299 smartwatch not to use it? – I can manage two days of battery usage, maybe just stretching into a third day. However, that’s not always been the case, with the Galaxy Watch Ultra sometimes complaining of low battery status only a day and half into testing, despite fairly similar usage profiles over both periods.

I’ve only had the Galaxy Watch Ultra for a little under a fortnight so my testing regime is sadly limited – and only a sample size of one, of course – but I can’t help but feel a little disappointed here.

By way of comparison, it was only a few weeks ago that I tested out the Oppo Watch X, a device with a marginally smaller battery than the Galaxy Watch Ultra, but one that could last through 3-4 days without fuss.

Charging is via a proprietary recharging disc/cable – essentially the same one that Samsung’s offered for prior Galaxy Watches – with no supplied actual charger in the box.

Galaxy Watch Ultra: Alex’s Verdict

The Galaxy Watch Ultra is a visually striking smart wearable, and I can see the appeal if you’re a multi-sport athlete with an Android phone looking for a more robust device.

However, Samsung’s own prevarications about its water resistance – much of which I suspect relates to it dancing around warranty terms when and or if something goes wrong – and its battery life only being marginally better than the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic leaves me seriously wanting, especially at this asking price.

There’s absolutely space in the Android world for a larger and more durable smart wearable, and it’s great that Samsung is starting that journey – but as a version one product, this feels like it’s not quite there yet.

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