The 44mm Watch5 tends to hover around 20 percent after I wake up the next day, and that’s with two walks with auto-tracking, checking and responding to notifications, GPS navigation when riding my electric scooter, and sleep tracking . Thirty minutes of charging from 20 percent brought it up to 70 percent, which is good enough, but I wish it charged even faster. The Watch5 Pro fares slightly better, typically lasting until the end of the second day after the same level of activity on a single charge.
These numbers are better than the Apple Watch’s battery life, but only marginally. I should also disclose that my battery results are with the display always on, so the Watch5 will last longer if you don’t turn it on. me he didn’t turn on continuous heart rate monitoring and left it at the default value, which tracks your heart rate every 10 minutes while still. Turning it on will chew up the battery even more.
When it comes to health and fitness tracking, the most important thing to know before you buy is that the electrocardiogram feature (cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration) only works if you pair these watches with a Samsung smartphone. It’s a really silly restriction. Technically, this applies to blood pressure monitoring, but this feature has not yet been approved by the FDA despite being available in South Korea for years.
Everything else works perfectly with Android phones. I wore an Apple Watch Series 7 on my opposite wrist while testing the Wear5s, and almost every metric they measured matched the Apple Watch perfectly, give or take a few digits. This includes heart rate measurements, sleep tracking, blood oxygen levels and steps. Even when I hit the gym and hopped on an exercise bike, the Watch5’s activity training screen is almost a replica of what Apple offers on the Apple Watch (a good thing). I like to have the Galaxy speak when I reach certain milestones, like after 30 minutes on the bike.
One of my favorite features of the Galaxy Watch5 series is the automatic training detection, especially when it automatically kicks in when I walk my dog. There’s something about a watch that counts my daily walks as a form of exercise that makes me feel a little better when I can’t do any strenuous exercise that day, and actively encourages me to walk a little more. It’s also great at figuring out when I stop walking, automatically pausing if I’m waiting to cross a traffic light, and restarting when my legs start moving.
The sleep tracking has also been pretty accurate for me, and it now tracks blood oxygen levels and how much you snore when you’re in the land of the settlement. It’s good for evidence gathering because I can show it to my partner I definitely didn’t snore last night. A new feature is a training program to improve your overall sleep. It takes a full week to collect data, so I’m only into my first week of a four-week sleep course.