Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 review – Pickr

Quick review

Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 (SM-L335F) – from $649 for 40mm, $699 for 44mm

The good

A neat design combining circles and squares

Comes with its own identity that clearly isn’t an Apple Watch clone

Lots of health sensors

Comes with Sapphire Glass

Durable at IP68 and MIL-STD-810H

Quick band changing system

The not-so-good

Battery life is not great, maxing at a day… and sometimes far less

Android compatibility when you don’t have a Samsung phone is not consistent or fantastic

Dedicated button for Google Gemini seems like a waste

With a design that stands out and a set of health technology features that goes beyond the basics, the Galaxy Watch 8 is a great choice, provided you can live with the battery life.

If the Apple Watch is for iPhone owners only, what do Android users have for them? That’s a question we’re often asked as technology commentators, often followed by “will Apple ever make the Apple Watch for Android?”

The answer to that last one is tentative “unlikely”, followed by a suggestion of what can be found on Android, as manufacturers do their darnedest to impress.

Samsung has been building wearables longer than most, and its latest could be the best example yet. Sleek, stylish, and clearly a watch, it’s one of the more intriguing examples of wearable out there for folks who run Google’s Android operating system, thanks to its assortment of tech and premium materials.

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Design and features

With a design that more or less answers the question “what if the squircle watches went full circle?”, Samsung has built something with its own personality.

Your typical watch is a circle, and an Apple Watch is a softened square, also known as a circle. With the exception of a triangular Hamilton Ventura, this about the norm, but in Samsung’s Watch 8, there’s a slightly different approach: a softened square with a circle inside.

The design gives Samsung something different to work with, and a look that stands out. It gives the circular form a space to hide its technology in, while providing it with an unusual frame.

If anything, the look is an identity, something Samsung calls the “cushion design”, built in aluminium and glass, and protected by the premium sapphire up top.

Inside, there’s a Samsung-made Exynos W1000 5-core 3 nanometre processor, and the hardware is paired with 2GB RAM, 32GB storage, and Google’s WearOS with Samsung’s One UI over the top.

You won’t really need to think about that. What you will want to think about is the Samsung “Bioactive” sensor, a health system made of an optical heart rate sensor, electrical heart rate sensor (ECG), plus a bioelectrical impedance analysis for measuring more of the health than you might expect.

A temperature sensor is also found in the watch, as are sensors for barometer, accelerometer, light, and even geomagnetism (used for proximity and position tracking).

Depending on the model you choose, the wearable will come with WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, and GPS, though you can also get it with 4G LTE.

There are two sizes to choose form — 40mm and 44mm — and they’re all rated for IP68 and MIL-STD-810H military spec for durability, the body made from aluminium and the screen protected by Sapphire glass.

Each screen is a little different, the 40mm providing a 1.34 inch circle in a square body, while the 44mm provides a 1.47 inch circular in a square body.

Samsung has also provided a way to replace bands easily called a dynamic lug system, offering a slim button on the reverse of the watch that detaches the bands quickly and easily.

In-use

There’s not a lot you’ll need to remember using the Galaxy Watch 8, with a touchscreen at your disposal compared to the combination of touch and a physical control ring on the slightly bigger Watch 8 Classic. The two are otherwise identical, and both lean on the touchscreen, as do most smartwatches in general.

Using the Watch 8, you’ll swipe down for power controls, swipe up for an app menu, and swipe left and right for widgets and notifications.

Meanwhile, there are two physical buttons that feel otherwise useless at times: one is dedicated to Google’s Gemini, an AI you mightn’t care about whether it’s on your wrist or not, and the other acts as a back button.

For the bulk of this review, once the realisation of how the buttons worked had cemented, we largely steer clear of them. The fact that one served Gemini — a feature we don’t often use — we realised we could live without touching it.

You can change the shortcut to another assistant, the much less used Bixby by Samsung, a smart assistant we’re not even sure Samsung acknowledges on mobile anymore, but that’s it. The choice isn’t truly yours for how you change the shortcut, and is just a choice of assistants.

Not being able to change that shortcut is a bit of a missed opportunity. AI on phones hasn’t been quite the game-changer many expected — you only need to glance at the half-baked version of “Magic Cue” Google rolled out to the Pixel 10 Pro XL to see that. But having a dedicated button for an AI assistant on the wrist just feels like a waste, especially if you’re not going to use it.

Performance

The good news is that once you begin using the Galaxy Watch 8, it all gets a little easier. The watch is fast and responsive, and outside of a little lag between your phone’s notifications and a delay on your wrist, feels as connected as the rest of the hardware.

Samsung has added some more watch faces and provided ways to play with the complications, giving you that little bit more control you might have wanted.

In fact, the more you play with the watch, the more you realise the main focus is on health activity, with watch faces focused on the time and activities rather than the playful antics of cartoon characters.

There aren’t as many playful watch faces at all, a fact that dissatisfied the little ones when playing with this screen. Kids won’t really be interested in the Galaxy Watch 8 look, which is fine, because as an adult, there’s a lot here.

Health features

Most of what’s here is about health, with the “bioactive” sensor focused on that. You only need to check out the watch’s insistence to use Galaxy Health to get that message.

Inside the app and with the extra Health Monitor app on the Galaxy Store (only on Samsung’s store, which means it only works on Samsung phones), you’ll be able to get an assortment of features working, ranging from ECG to heart rate to SpO2 blood oxygen to the sleep apnoea tracking just activated in Australia.

There are also others you may not be thinking about, such as the antioxidant tracker, a new feature that has you check the carotene levels in the skin on your thumb from the past two weeks to see whether you’ve been eating enough fruit and veggies.

We’re not sure if wine necessarily plays a part, but given that red wine does have antioxidants in it, we may need to have a regular glass to see if our index goes up, while also indulging in the regular assortment or fruits and veggies.

Samsung has included other features, too, which can really add to the health feature set in ways you don’t expect.

Take the blood pressure monitor, which needs a few steps of configuration, but once it’s done, it works a treat. You’ll not want to throw away your blood pressure cuff — we keep using the monitor from Withings — but the Galaxy Watch 8 covered an almost identical reading tested seconds apart.

The fact that this is included and can be calibrated is a bit of a clever bonus, particularly since it doesn’t need a cuff to use. We probably wouldn’t really on it over our standard blood pressure monitor, but in terms of a regular test, it’s definitely convenient to have it directly inside the watch.

Battery

The battery is where things get pear-shaped quickly for Samsung’s circular watch. A big always-on screen just doesn’t fare well for Samsung, it seems, and the closer it gets to building a true Apple Watch competitor, the closer it also gets to the similar battery woes Apple deals with.

Much like how the Series 10 Apple Watch struggled to hit beyond a day and more or less required a charge nightly, the Galaxy Watch 8 also has that problem, at least in the 44mm size model we reviewed.

We could get beyond the 24 hour mark, but then the watch would run out of juice about 4 to 6 hours later, which meant it shutting down or going into the emergency power mode when we were nowhere near a charger.

On one day, the Galaxy Watch 8 struggled to even hit a day, needing a recharged around 10 am after a little over 24 hours on the wrist, and when recharging it, it struggled to stay on until we went to bed, barely lasting 10 hours. In that instance, we’d had a phone call diverted to the phone while the sensors were tracking more fitness.

It’s just not a fantastic result, and really tells you the Galaxy Watch 8 is a one-day watch that you’ll want need to charge nightly.

Value

The price airs on the expensive side, too, starting at $649 for the 40mm Bluetooth model and $699 for the larger 44mm version. We ended up reviewing the model with LTE in the hardware for on-the-go mobility, which adds a hundred bucks to the variants, making it $749 and $799 respectively. This review is focused on the $799 44mm WiFi/Bluetooth/LTE Galaxy Watch 8.

That price tag can feel expensive for the hardware, which is a little more than competitor offerings sans-LTE, but still somewhat near where it probably should be.

It just feels expensive because while the design has changed, the watch hasn’t really been firmed up in the ways it probably should have been. A day of battery life is a small amount to really pay for.

What needs work?

So what needs work? The battery is clearly one of those things, which just doesn’t deliver any real confidence in being able to use the wearable for a whole lot. Use the screen or features or sensors more, and the battery basically responds with a big fat “nope”.

The controls bother me somewhat, largely because that top button is useless on a single push when you’re on the main clock screen, asking you to hold it down to launch an assistant you might not even use, be it Bixby or Google’s Gemini.

Given that it could have launched a menu or any other shortcut, it just feels like Samsung’s approach to controls hasn’t been as thought out as the health features, and didn’t seem like it encouraged exploration of the apps compared to how Apple’s, well, does.

But the other thing that bothers is the Android integration, which is more deeply tied with Samsung devices and sometimes struggles with Androids that aren’t made by Samsung.

We tried this review in two stages: first with a phone we’re familiar with from Samsung, the Galaxy Fold 7, and then another we were reviewing from Google’s Pixel 10 range.

When it came to a phone made by Samsung, the Galaxy Watch 8 performed flawlessly outside of battery life, remaining connected to the mobile and triggering all the sensors when it needed to. It seems to work excellently with Samsung mobiles, as well you’d expect it to.

But use the Galaxy Watch 8 with any other Android not made by Samsung, and the watch doesn’t quite work as well. The health sensors and footstep tracking kick in when you’re walking, but messages and notifications don’t appear to go through even when they’ve been told to, and at times, the watch just shows a “disconnection” icon for the phone, even though it can still get calls sent to it from the phone.

It’s all a little maddening, and really tells you that Samsung’s watches play best with a Samsung, even though they’re made to work on Android.

Even though the Galaxy Watch 8 is technically an Android wearable, it’s difficult to recommend unless you have a Samsung Android specifically. It just isn’t as compatible, which genuinely feels like a bit of a miss from Samsung’s end.

What we love

If you do have a Samsung phone, however, what delivers exceedingly well for Samsung is the assortment of sensors found in the watch.

The combination means you can check your heart rate, ECG, step count, blood oxygen, muscle and fat separation made from your body weight, antioxidant levels, blood pressure, stress levels, and more.

There’s just so much here packaged in the “bioactive” sensor stack that it really feels like a wearable made for your health.

Health may be a part of pretty much every smartwatch, but in the Galaxy Watch 8, it’s here in a big way. Simply put, the Galaxy Watch 8 is built to be good for your health.

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8 vs the competition

Working out where the Galaxy Watch 8 fits into the Android wearable landscape is interesting if only because while it’s an Android-compatible wearable, it clearly doesn’t deal with all Android phones the same way.

In our testing, Samsung Galaxy phones were fine, but Google Pixels less so, a problem given that Google Pixel phones are essentially the best example of a stock phone out there. Which means the Galaxy Watch 8 is a fine choice for someone with a Samsung phone, but less so for owners of just about any other Android made by any other company.

It’s a little like the world Apple is trying to create, where if you buy an Apple Watch you can only use it with an iPhone, a move that keeps you locked to an iPhone to a degree. Samsung isn’t far from that, keeping you tied to a Samsung in ways.

But even for folks with a Samsung phone, there’s still more choice out there.

For instance, if you want something in a similar size but with a different look, Google’s upcoming Pixel Watch will get you there, though we don’t know the battery life just yet. If you still want a Galaxy Watch but need more battery life, the more expensive Galaxy Watch Ultra is your best bet, providing up to two days of regular life.

Alternatively, if you need a good week to two weeks of battery life and can live without the full touchscreen experience, the Withings ScanWatch 2 Horizon is our pick, or alternatively the ScanWatch 2 if you don’t want the diver-style casing. Both offer similar hardware and health features in the casing of an analogue watch, complete with a tiny screen for notifications and making your way around the watch’s health features.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

We started this review asking an important question Android owners are always keen to answer: simply put, if the Apple Watch is for iPhone only — and only the iPhone — what can Android owners use instead?

The answer is a polished, durable and clever wearable that comes with the same pitfalls and caveats of the Apple equivalent, battery life being chief amongst them.

In its eight incarnation, the Galaxy Watch is easily one of the best health and time-focused gadgets you can find on Android, though Samsung phones are clearly the intended market here. A Samsung phone will work with everything this wearable has to offer, while other Android models may want to seek elsewhere.

But if you have a recent Samsung phone, such as the lovely S25 Ultra or even something that popped out a year or two ago, the Galaxy Watch 8 provides as close an experience to one of the best other wearables you can find.

It’s not perfect, but it delivers plenty in health. Overall, it’s an insightful addition to a Galaxy owner’s life.

Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 (SM-L335F)