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Irish Mirror

Lifestyle

Mark Kavanagh

Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro review: a complete Android smartwatch

Samsung Android Google Maps

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is the company’s flagship wearable, offering superior sports tracking and battery life to the standard Galaxy Watch 5 but at a higher price point.

However, the good news is that price has been slashed in the January sale on Samsung’s website -and you can now buy one for €359 rather than €479.

Having spent a couple of months with the Pro model, my take on the features and performance is that this is easily the best Android watch I’ve ever tested.

Galaxy Watch 5 Pro runs Samsung’s One UI over the Google/Samsung collaborative effort that is Wear OS 3.

You can customise watch faces, track all your workouts and monitor important health metrics such as heart rate, body composition, blood oxygen and sleep.

The watch can take blood pressure readings and an ECG too if it’s paired with a Samsung phone.

It can technically measure your body temperature when you are sleeping too but that function does not seem to be enabled yet.

Step count, heart rate monitoring and distance measuring are all on a par with wearables such as Apple Watch Series 8 and more than 90 sport modes are available.

The auto-detection for walking, and some other activities, is excellent.

GPS tracking

The GPS device has precise tracking that can be used to navigate tricky mountain paths and help you track your way back if you get lost.

If you cycle or hike a lot, you can load a GPX file to navigate your route. You upload the GPX file to your phone then import it into Samsung Health, which then syncs the route to your watch.

The first time you load a GPX file, you’ll see a route tile on your watch. And you can enable auto-navigation for walking and cycling in Google Maps. There is no voice navigation yet, but it is believed to be coming soon.

Hopefully, this feature will be enabled for running and other sport modes soon.

Sleep data includes sleep stages, snore detection and blood oxygen monitoring. Every morning you’ll be given a sleep score and after seven days of tracking your sleep coaching is enabled.

The 1.4in AMOLED display is bright and colourful and easy to read in sunlight.

You also get useful features like offline music playback, Google Assistant is built in and Google Wallet contactless payments, not to mention everything else you might want a smartwatch to do including reply to emails and messages on the go.

Apps load quickly, menus are responsive to swipes and taps, and the extensive Play Store’s app library is catching up with the extensive third-party app support on Apple Watch. You can even control your smart home devices thanks to Smart Things integration, but only if paired with a Samsung phone. The same applies to the remote smartphone camera control and the AR emoji watch faces.

Design and build

The complete smartwatch package for Samsung users comes in a rather sleek looking 45mm design too, with a durable titanium/sapphire build that includes a secure magnetic clasp on the strap.

Both watch and strap are available in black and grey colour options.

And the watch is compatible with third-party 20mm bands too.

It’s IP68 rated for dust and water resistance, incidentally, and is waterproof up to 50 metres.

On the downside, Galaxy Watch 5 Pro only works with Android phones and is a bit thicker on your wrist (15mm) than some other wearables.

Non-Samsung users still get a flawlessly executed Android watch package of notifications, on-wrist phone call support, calendar events, alarms, timers, Google Pay, Google Maps and onboard music storage.

You’ll need to pair the watch with the Galaxy Wearables app to organise your settings and layout, and you use the Samsung Health app for mining your health and fitness data. This analysis is not as in-depth as Pixel Watch, Apple Watch, Fitbit Sense or any Garmin, Coros or Polar sports watch. But you can easily link the app up with the likes of Strava for more in-depth analysis.

Battery life is a couple of full days with the Always on Display enabled and more than three days with it switched off. The firm said you can get 20 hours of continuous GPS tracking and 80 hours of regular smartwatch use.

Recharging is with a proprietary charger which can boost you from zero to more than 40 per cent in a half an hour and up to 100 per cent in 90 minutes.

There is support for 10W wireless charging too, but it’s difficult to sit the watch on some wireless chargers because of the strap’s design.

Verdict

If you are a Samsung smartphone owner, then this is the best smartwatch you can buy. But the beautifully crafted wearable with the stunning display also suits other Android phone users almost as much.