Summary
- Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 7 is a standard year-over-year refresh with a new chipset that promises better battery life and performance.
- The Galaxy Watch Ultra is a rugged, premium option for extreme athletes, offering features like 10 ATM water resistance and long battery life.
- Both smartwatches feature new updates like Wear OS 5, dual-frequency GPS, and the Galaxy Watch 7 includes Apple Watch-style gesture controls.
Samsung announced two new smartwatches today at its Galaxy Unpacked event in Paris. The Galaxy Watch 7 is exactly what you’d expect — a standard year-over-year refresh of one of the best Wear OS watches on the market, bringing a new chipset and a handful of other, minor updates. The Galaxy Watch Ultra, on the other hand, is different. It’s a square, titanium behemoth that looks more than a little like a certain other Ultra smartwatch, made for extreme athletes who need features like 10 ATM water resistance, long battery life, and quick access to manual activity tracking.
Samsung Galaxy Watch 7: An expected upgrade
Outside a new style of band, the Galaxy Watch 7 looks just like the Galaxy Watch 6, which looked more or less like the Galaxy Watch 5 and Watch 4 before it. It’s packing a new Samsung Exynos W1000 chipset, which is built on a 3nm process. Samsung says the W1000 is three times faster and 30 percent more power efficient than the W930. That means that, despite the visual and functional similarities to previous generations of Galaxy Watch, the Watch 7 should be noticeably faster and last significantly longer on a charge than the Watch 6.
There are a couple of notable new features this year. Wear OS 5 is debuting on Samsung’s latest watches, as is One UI Watch 6.1.1. And the Watch 7 has dual-frequency GPS, which should make its navigation more accurate, especially in congested places like cities.
There’s also an Apple Watch-style double pinch gesture to do things like answer calls. Samsung’s offered similar gesture controls as an accessibility option for years, but the Galaxy Watch 7 is the first in the series to incorporate gesture controls as a primary feature.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: Colossal and costly
The Galaxy Watch Ultra is a more premium, rugged option. Its name, shape, and concept all invite comparisons to the Apple Watch Ultra series, which is similarly marketed as suitable for activities like scuba diving (the Galaxy Watch Ultra is 10 ATM water resistant) and mountain climbing (Samsung says the Watch Ultra is guaranteed to work at elevations of up to 9,000 meters above sea level — higher than Mount Everest).
The Ultra’s distinguishing features are all oriented toward the type of exercise most users will never do — for example, there’s a widget made to help with triathlon training. But it’s also got a huge battery for a smartwatch, which Samsung says affords it up to 60 hours of normal use, and up to four whole days with battery saving features active. There’s a third button on the watch’s right edge that Samsung calls the Quick Button; by default, it’s a shortcut to the watch’s workout tracking functionality, but it can be mapped to other functions, too. Annoyingly, even though the Quick Button rotates, that rotation doesn’t do anything in the watch’s software.
Galaxy Watch 7 and Galaxy Watch Ultra: Hands-on impressions
I got the chance to check out the Galaxy Watch 7 and Watch Ultra at an Unpacked preview event in New York this week. If I’m being honest, I don’t have much to say about the Galaxy Watch 7 after handling it for a brief amount of time. I’m excited at the prospect of performance and efficiency gains brought by the new W1000 chipset, but those are the types of improvements that take more time to evaluate. At first blush, the Watch 7 feels very much like the Watch 6. That’s hardly a bad thing, though, and we’ll report back on performance and battery life after we’ve had the time to test it more thoroughly.
The Galaxy Watch Ultra is a bigger departure from Samsung’s previous watches. It’s large; although it has the same sapphire crystal-coated 1.5″ AMOLED as the 44 mm Galaxy Watch 7, its 47 mm square case is much chunkier. It’s also nearly twice as heavy as the larger Watch 7 at 60.5 grams. That’s a lot on paper, but I took off a non-smart wristwatch with a metal band to try the Ultra on, and I was surprised to find it didn’t feel heavy on my wrist. I could imagine the Watch Ultra being uncomfortable to sleep in, but it seems like wearing it day-to-day should be comfortable enough if you’ve got the wrists for it.
The Galaxy Watch 7 and the Galaxy Watch Ultra are available for preorder today, with full availability on July 24. The Galaxy Watch 7 starts at $299.99 for the 40 mm version that comes in green and cream colorways; the larger 44 mm model is available in green or silver. The Galaxy Watch Ultra starts at $649.99, a full $100 more than the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro that offered some similar functionality when it launched in 2022. That’s certainly unusually expensive for a Wear OS device, but it does undercut Apple’s Watch Ultra 2, which retails for $799.
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Samsung Galaxy Watch 7
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 is Samsung’s base model smartwatch for 2024. It looks a lot like the Galaxy Watch 6, but packs an upgraded Exynos W1000 chipset that should mean significantly better battery life and performance.
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Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is purpose-built for hardcore athletic types, with features like 10 ATM water resistance and a battery that lasts for days.
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