Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra review: don't sleep on this Android smartwatch

Samsung’s sleep apnea detection could save your life, and it's Galaxy Watch Ultra is $150 cheaper than the Apple Watch Ultra 2

Update: Our Samsung Galaxy Watch review now includes even more testing as the new smartwatch came out this week. This includes new deals and where to buy it.

🏆 Review score: 4 out of 5

🏅 Editor’s Choice Award

Pros

• ✅ ⌚ Samsung’s best smartwatch with optimal fitness tracking

• ✅ 🔘 Three physical buttons for quick access to shortcuts

• ✅ 🏃‍♂️ Multi-sport mode and robust fitness tracking software

• ✅ 😴 Sleep Score, 📈 Energy Score and 📋 Wellness Tips

• ✅ 😪 Groundbreaking Sleep Apnea detection is a major win

• ✅ ❤️ Tracks heart rate with high/low alerts and inactivity alerts

• ✅ 🔋 Day-and-a-half battery (up to 100 hours with power saving)

• ✅ 📶 Dual-band GPS for more accurate indoor/outdoor tracking

• ✅ 🪨 Durable sapphire sapphire glass and very water-resistant

• ✅ 🧲 Magnetic lugs make swapping out bands incredibly easy

Cons

• ❌ 💰 At $649, it’s Samsung’s priciest watch (but cheaper than Apple’s)

• ❌ ♊ Lots of feature-overlap with the cheaper Galaxy Watch 7

• ❌ 🔄 No rotating bezel nor rotating crown in favor of “digital bezel”

• ❌ 📐 This is a lot chunkier than your normal smartwatch

• ❌ 🔢 Limited number of first-party straps due to new interface

I’ve been wearing the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra for 16 days, and I can confirm that it’s exactly as its “Ultra” name implies: Samsung’s take on the Apple Watch Ultra in every way. It echoes the thicker watch size, orange hero band and accents, and, at $649, the fact that this is now Samsung’s most expensive smartwatch to date.

However, I discovered a bit more about the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra in my testing for this review – including a few features I wish Apple would adopt in the Apple Watch Ultra 3. Here’s my full review breakdown. The Galaxy Fold 6 review and Galaxy Flip 6 review will be next, followed by the Samsung Galaxy 3 Pro.

😪 Don’t sleep on it. Going beyond activity and sleep tracking, this new smartwatch is the first to detect sleep apnea with FDA authorization. Samsung’s sleep apnea detection could save your life, and it’s only on the new Galaxy Watch Ultra and Watch 7. No need to invest time and money into getting tested with heavy gear (I’ve done it).

Samsung’s sleep apnea detection could save your life, and it’s only on the new Galaxy Watch Ultra and Watch 7.

‘Ultra’ Fitness tracking

🏃‍♂️ Anything you can do… This is one robust tracker with a multi-sport fitness mode, race-against-your-past time trials mode, dual-band GPS, and ECG – all just like the Apple Watch Ultra. It matches its iPhone-only counterpart almost point-for-point, and the metrics, down to the step counter are comparable.

📈 …I can do better. I dig Samsung’s new diagnostics, which offer me an Energy Score. It combines activity and sleep tracking into one daily number. Am I good to go today, or am I going to be tired and need to proceed with caution? My watch will tell me more plainly (read: it’s user-friendly) than Garmin and Apple’s readiness scores.

🍎 Samsung’s Apple impression. There’s no getting around it: this does copy a lot of the presentation of the Apple Watch Ultra. But Samsung needed to make a high-end watch, so it was always going to be thicker, and, to be fair, the company has used “Ultra” to denote its premium tier (see our Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra review). I don’t know if it had to copy the orange accents and band used in its marketing.

💸 Cheaper than Apple. Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is $649, or $150 cheaper than the $799 Apple Watch Ultra 2. So while it’s pricier than a normal smartwatch, it’s very competitive at the top end. And the top end is where Samsung’s watch ranks.

• Plus, during the pre-order phase, Samsung is offering boosted trade-in deals

♊ Twinning with Galaxy Watch 7. Samsung has more overlap between the Watch 7, which costs $299 (40mm) and $329 (44mm) than I first anticipated. Features like dual-frequency GPS, sleep apnea and all of the sensors made it over to the cheaper Watch 7. It’s only the screen size, battery life, titanium casing, and water resistance (5ATM vs 10ATM) that you lose out on. LTE is an optional $50 on the cheaper Watch 7. The average consumer who doesn’t need all the bells-and-whistles of a sporty watch will do just fine with the sleeker and less expensive Galax Watch 7.

Galaxy Watch Ultra design

⌚ Circle gets the square. The look grew on me. Its circular 1.5-inch screen encased thick square-shaped case initially seemed like a mismatch. But this is meant to be a sporty and durable watch, down the grade-5 titanium and stylish tick marks. It won’t appeal to everyone, but I began to appreciate it next to the plainer Apple Watch Ultra.

🪶 Lighter than the specs suggest. The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra (60.5g) is barely lighter than the Apple Watch Ultra (61.3g) on the specs sheet but with slightly flattened dimensions. It spreads out its weight and hugs the width of my wrist more. My Apple Watch Ultra sits up higher and takes up less surface area, feeling heavier. I can’t express this enough: the Galaxy Watch Ultra is more comfortable to wear.

🧲 Magnetic attraction. Samsung’s new lungless design secures bands to the watch via magnets. It’s a bit simpler than the Apple Watch’s slide-in mechanic (which hasn’t changed since I reviewed the Apple Watch 1) and just as secure.

🩹 Band on the run. Here’s the downside for now. At launch only a limited number of bands are compatible with the Galaxy Watch Ultra. It comes with the territory when launching new designs.

• Marine (Orange, Dark Gray, White, Green)

• Trail (Dark Gray, White Sand)

• Peakform (Orange, Gray and Sand)

🔜 More bands are on the way. Beyond the official Galaxy Watch bands, I’m seeing other options coming from Spigen, SOLOUP, Sankel, Boho, Chofit, and Areziir. This includes a metal link and Milanese loop bands to add style to this sport smartwatch.

🎨 Orange is the new black. I liked the Titanium Gray hero colorway with a dark case and orange tick marks better than the Titanium Silver or Titanium White. There’s a reason that Samsung is using this color as its Galaxy Watch Ultra hero model.

Galaxy Watch Ultra interface

🔘 Buttoned up. Three physical buttons adorn the Ultra, all on the right side (for a righty). There are two oval buttons and one round button right in the middle of them. I like the fact that they’re on the right side of the watch, as I often accidentally press Apple’s Action button with my thumb on the left side when trying to grip the case.

🔄 No rotating bezel. Samsung got rid of the much-loved rotating bezel of its Classic watches (where you could rotate the metal bezel around the screen to cycle menus). Instead, there’s a “virtual rotating bezel” for navigation by touching the outside of the screen. It doesn’t work nearly as well, as your fingers cover up the touchscreen. I get the reason why – fewer parts for a sporty watch – so I’m torn about this.

🤏 A double pinch of gimmicks. There are three universal gestures that trigger commands or shortcuts. Knock to open an app of your choice, shake to deny calls or turn off alarms, and double-pinch to snap a photo. I got these to work in my initial hands-on demo, but not when I got my review unit. I realized that I wasn’t upset.

Galaxy Watch Ultra battery

🔋 2x the battery life. The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is built for endurance and beats every other fitness smartwatch I’ve tested. It has twice the battery capacity of the smaller Watch 7, and on normal days, I got a day-and-a-half of use.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is built for endurance and beats every other fitness smartwatch I’ve tested.

🪫 Power-saving mode. You can get 100 hours by enabling the power-saving mode. But I mostly used this to extend days where I pushed myself by stringing together multiple workouts. Otherwise, I noticed the battery drained within a single day due to heavy GPS usage. One thing I love about Samsung’s power-saver settings: whether or not its health tracking features are included in this mode is up to you. It’s a separate toggle in the settings menu.

⚡ No reverse wireless charging. I could very slowly bring past Galaxy Watches back to life via reverse wireless charging by placing them on the back of a Samsung phone. That small perk has been dropped because of the new sensor. No Qi charging either, so you best not lose that magnetic charger included in the box.

⏲️ It takes 100 minutes to charge fully. The Galaxy Watch Ultra goes from 0% to 100% more slowly than other smartwatches I’ve tested for review. This includes the Apple Watch Ultra, which takes 15 minutes less time to charge fully.

Specs & software

💡 1.5x brighter. Whether or not you’re an “Ultra” athlete, you’ll appreciate the 3,000 nits of peak brightness outdoors. It’s a serious upgrade from 2,000 nits on the Watch 6 Pro and another way Samsung ties the Apple Watch Ultra 2. Maybe we’ll see Apple break this tie at its iPhone 16 event with the new Apple Watch 10.

📱 Works on all Androids – mostly. I confirmed that the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra works with other Androids by pairing it with my Google Pixel 8, as does the Samsung Galaxy Ring. But, I found that a few features are exclusive to Samsung devices (so I switched back to my Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6).

What’s missing from Android phones:

• Energy Score

• ECG (in the Health Monitoring app)

• Sleep Apnea detection (in the Health Monitoring app)

• Double Pinch Universal Gesture control

• Suggested replies

🍎 Doesn’t work on iPhone. To my disappointment, the Galaxy Watch Ultra doesn’t work with Apple devices, even though there’s a Samsung Health iOS app. This isn’t all Samsung’s fault, as it has always struggled to get text messages, for example, to be anything but read-only notifications (meaning no replies or suggested replies) on the first set of its first smartwatches that I tested.

🙅‍♂️ Software’s hard. Samsung’s app ecosystem is a selling point – but not perfect. I find myself hunting down what I need among three apps: Samsung Health (for fitness and sleep metrics), Health Monitoring (for ECG and sleep apnea only) and Samsung Wear (setting and some metrics for the Watch and Galaxy Ring). There’s confusing overlap among these apps and dozens of permissions to get through (why is it all turned off by default?!). This out-of-the-box experience is a bit tedious.

💦 Get it wet & 🏊‍♂️ swim, but don’t 🤿 scuba. With an IP68 water resistance rating, you can get the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra wet and take it snorkeling in the ocean. But despite its 10ATM rating (100 meters / 328ft down for 10 minutes), Samsung’s fine print says it’s not meant for high-pressure water activities and diving.

Should I buy the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra?

If you still haven’t decided, let me basically tell you if you should get it:

Yes, if…

• ✅ You take fitness seriously and want Android’s most robust smartwatch

• ✅ You want strong sleep tracking and first-of-its-kind sleep apnea detection

• ✅ You need stellar battery life and a durable design from a fitness watch

• ✅ You’d like a large 1.5-inch screen that’s bright outdoors and very durable

• ✅ You dig the simple Energy Score to know your daily readiness number

No, if…

• ❌ You want a cheaper and sleeker smartwatch (get the Galaxy Watch 7)

• ❌ You have an iPhone (get the Apple Watch Ultra 2 or Apple Watch 9)

• ❌ You don’t need all the “Ultra” bells and whistles (get the Galaxy Watch 7)

• ❌ You’ll miss the rotating bezel (get Galaxy Watch 6 Classic)

First reviewed on July 20, 2024.
Updated on July 26, 2024.