Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is the flagship smartwatch from the South Korean brand. It's the company's second year of joint wearable initiative with Google called the new Wear OS Powered by Samsung. It is therefore to be seen how far the software experience on the Galaxy Watch 5 series have come. Also, with its Pro-moniker, the titular product has a lot to prove. The official website (where it also currently retails for ₹49,999) touts attractions like GPS route tracking, Sapphire Crystal screen, a massive 590mAh battery, among a host of other health, fitness, and smart features. I have been wearing the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro for more than 5 weeks now and here is my experience of using all these things.
One of the best things going for the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is its look. Yes it is a round-dial watch but sports a 45mm screen expanse cased in a raised lip and strong build materials for a powerful cum posh finish. The bill of materials includes Titanium casing, Sapphire Crystal glass front, and MIL-STD-810H compliance for endurance. Samsung has got an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance too.
Now while you are out and about, the watch calls for attention partly because of its premium appearance and because it sits pronounced on the wrist. It could be that I have a lean wrist, and the 44mm Apple Watch Series 6 that I, otherwise drive daily, looks and feels more compact in comparison.
Be that as it may, the Watch 5 Pro doesn't cause discomfort while strapped to my wrist for hours. The same can’t be said for donning it during sleep though. Well, as suggested earlier, it's a thicc boi and I like not having any watch (let alone this) on my wrist, whilst I’m resting. Don't worry, to test sleep tracking, I did wear it a couple of nights, and so you can also wear it if you want.
I share a similar mixed sentiment towards the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro’s magnetic metal buckle. Samsung calls it a D-buckle strap. The strap material is comfortable on wrist and the thing once set up, fastens and unfastens easily. However, the process of setting it up is a chore. This is true, especially whence you have to loosen the strap for taking a SpO2 read (as asked by the watch sometimes) or when you lend this luxury piece to others to try. The good thing is that you can buy bands from Samsung or other 3rd party vendors, and easily swap them.
From design, let’s get on to the beautifully designed watch faces that augment the Watch 5 Pro’s 1.4-inch Super AMOLED screen. There are plenty to choose from and among the preinstalled options, my picks would be Flower Garden, Info Board, and Digital Dashboard. Like the names of the latter two, many of the watch faces are data ridden but beautifully presented. Besides the built-in ones, you can also download watch complications from Facer and Play Store (Arigato WearOS).
As for the display itself, it exhibits 450×450 pixels or about 321 PPI density. That resolution and display quality appear great both indoors and outdoors thanks to a peak luminance of up to 1000 nits.
The black border engulfing the screen real estate is also bearable and acts as a digital rotating bezel with fine haptic feedback. It's an add-on navigation mode that fans of physical rotating bezels on Galaxy watches of yesteryear may appreciate, while others might not even know it's there. I personally preferred using the swipes and button taps.
Speaking of which, the navigation across the UI involves a sequence of slides, swipes, and taps. The top button (called Home button) sitting on the right side of the frame can be used for jumping right to the homescreen from any screen. Pressing it triggers Bixby and if you aren’t a fan of Samsung’s smart assistant, you can switch to Google Assistant instead (in select markets). You will have to configure the language and region settings for the latter to work though.
Overall, the UI responds smoothly and doesn't demand any long learning curve. Good. But what’s great is how Samsung lets you customize almost every aspect of the user interface such as menu options, watch complications, etc. This makes it a more personal experience than compared to using an Apple Watch. Well, it's the case of stringent gatekeeping on watchOS, while it's not so much on this Tizen-WearOS hybrid.
However, one area where I’m very miffed is the lack of iOS support with the new Watch 5 Pro (at least at the time of writing this). So, it seems Samsung and Google are locking in the WearOS users to the Android smartphone space. This saddens the open ecosystem enthusiast in me.
Now, while support for some things like this iOS compatibility is to be pushed from the brand’s end, the good thing about an open community is that if certain software features aren’t available in your region, you could get a workaround online. We will talk more about this in the next segment.
This section covers health and fitness features as well as many of Watch 5 Pro’s smart abilities. Let's begin with the monitoring and measurements.
With the Watch 5 Pro, you can track over 90 worjout modes (including swimming), 24×7 heart rate count (both manually and automatically thanks to a continuous tracker), blood oxygen measurement (including automatic reading while you are sleeping), how stressed you are (with breathing guidance), body fat composition, sleep health (with details about time on various sleep stages, snore detection), and even a Blood Pressure checker. The BP monitor is missing in India but you could perhaps get it by following this guide. We haven't tried this though.
So, BP aside, I did check the rest of the stuff and compared them side by side to the results from my Apple Watch. The scores were mostly comparable. That said there were some discrepancies too. For example in case of sleep tracking, this thing was behind by 20 minutes in one instance. However while Samsung falters in some areas, it compensates for that in other areas with goodies like Body Fat Composition and snore detection that you may find useful. Now by being useful, I mean that you can use those stats to track your progress and then improve in those areas. After all, the primary way of analyzing the effectiveness of such devices is by checking if they are consistent in their counting. The Galaxy Watch 5 Pro does a resepectable job in this respect.
Body composition result
In the day to day use, I like how proactively its step counter and workout detection work. The actual counting, the distance traveled and GPS tracking is decent too. Even software tricks like how the screen autorotates regardless of the orientation to show the watch face mean something.
Speaking of software, Samsung Health and Galaxy Wearable seem like quite mature apps. The former neatly arranges and shows settings and scores (with legible color coding) and the latter helps you in pairing (a bit lengthy process involving logins to Samsung account) and tweaking several facilities and functions you get with the Watch 5 Pro.
Samsung Galaxy Health app interface
I also appreciate smartphone-y complements like the support for Samsung Keyboard (with quick responses), media controls, optional increase in touch sensitivity for gloves, etc.
Coming to smart perks, you get hard fall detection, turn-by-turn navigation with voice or vibration-based alert, a backtracking option, and the facility to import your track routes (in GPX format for hiking and cycling) and other details into the watch. You can also connect the watch to third-party services like Strava and Technogym. You can get these and more apps from Google Play Store (on the connected phone or on the Watch 5 Pro). This vast app support is a big plus for this Tizen OS and Wear OS hybrid software. The only misgiving is that in some cases, there are similar apps from Google and Samsung on the watch. You can’t uninstall them either. Ugh!
Also, Google Assistant may not work out of the box because of some language and region restrictions. Bixby still can not answer all my queries. It is equipped to control watch settings and basic stuff like answering the weather situation.
Bixby failing at answering some rather simple questions.
Some other key features missing from the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro are ECG (certified but available in select markets only) and Skin Temperature Sensor (present but not active yet).
Finally, a decision by Samsung to not make the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro compatible with iPhones irks me. Even within the Android world, this watch works best with Samsung phones only.
Samsung could very well be thinking through these things, and will hopefully fix what's missing or is half-baked at the moment.
Galaxy Watch 5 Pro bears a 590mAh battery that is rated to last 80 hours between charges. In my experience, it was getting me more than 3 days of runtime. And when it’s in a pinch for a charge, Samsung claims just 15 minutes of fast charging with the bundled magnetic puck can drive it for about 1h 40 mins or so. The charger has a fairly long cable which is good.
Now your mileage may vary depending on which features you use and how constantly you use them. Some battery drainers could be GPS, Always-on display, continuous heart rate monitoring, SpO2 tracking and snoring detection during sleep, as well as running display on high brightness.
If the display had been an LTPO, I suppose the battery life would have slightly benefited. Also, on a side note, this big battery is a contributor to the watch’s weight. So in a way, with great power comes great weight.
Breaking down a gizmo like this in itself is a heavy task and I have tried to cover everything I experienced in my time with it. Let's now tie it all in.
Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is one of the best smartwatches for Android smartphones that’s currently available in India. It is built strong, looks bold and unique, and has a boatload of features. The latter cover regular health and wellness monitoring, some advanced fitness trackers, smart abilities like GPS routing, and the watch’s overall proactiveness in tracking and alerts. All of this is backed by more than 3 days of battery life which is fairly good for a Wear OS-based watch. What is also fairly good is its tracking accuracy. However, fairly good accuracy might not be enough for you and you may also amiss the geo-restricted or otherwise unavailable features on the Watch 5 Pro. And so, if you demand more from a Pro-grade wearable, you could look elsewhere, although you should also note that many of those competitors may not be all as smart as the Samsung's offering.
That's what I think and if you are interested, you can check out the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro on Samsung.com and leading online and offline outlets.
As for other technology news, product reviews, sci-tech features and updates, you can keep reading Digit.in.