Review: Galaxy Watch 7 Ultra

When my 5 year old Galaxy Watch Active2 finally gave out this year, I decided to wait a couple of months for Samsung’s announcement of the 7 series watches. The wait paid off with both Watch 7 and Ultra being great updates to the lineup. The Galaxy series still remains the best option if you’re in the Android ecosystem.

In the end, I picked up the Ultra model. The larger screen, durability and battery capacity swayed me in its favor. But truth be told, the Watch 7 is the stronger contender, with most of the same features at less than half the price.

Display

The 47mm screen size does feel a tad large on my wrist, and the watch is also quite thick, which makes it feel bulkier. It’s a bit less comfortable than the Watch Active2, but it didn’t take too long to get used to it. However, the large screen size has meant that I have on occasion used the watch to type out a reply to a text.

Battery

If I had to pick one feature that pushed me to the Ultra over the regular Watch 7, it was the much larger battery. It has a 590mAh battery, compared to 425mAh on the 44mm Watch 7, and 300mAh on the 40mm model.

As I’m writing this, the watch has been running for 3 days and an hour, with 7% remaining. This is without always on display (AOD), but still impressive. I tried the AOD and it lasted a few hours less.

When I first got the watch, battery life was closer to 2 days without AOD. That’s decent, but the Watch Active2 was already lasting a day and a half. However, a recent software update made a drastic improvement and pushed it over the 3 day mark. For comparison, the Apple Watch Ultra lasts about 36 hours, and the basic Apple watch about 18 hours.

Charging

Previous Galaxy watches supported revere charging, where you could prop up the watch on the back of your Samsung phone, to charge it. Unfortunately, this watch doesn’t support reverse charging, which is baffling to me. This was a perfect example of Samsung’s watches and phones being perfectly integrated like you’d see in the Apple ecosystem, but they made them incompatible.

The charging puck also comes with a USB-C connector, so I usually have to connect it to my Macbook to charge because I don’t have anything else to connect it to.

Design

The “squircle” shape of the watch has divided opinion. The screen is still circular, but the frame has a squarish shape, probably in an attempt to make it look more like the Apple Watch Ultra. I don’t hate it, and have gotten used to it, but it’s not a shape I would choose.

There are no physical rotating bezels. Those have long been highlight of flagship Galaxy watches. They allow using the watch without touchscreen with gloves on. This would have been really useful during the cold Canadian winters, but unfortunately that’s missing here.

The choice to put a third button on the side is interesting. I haven’t found them especially useful, but it’s nice to be able to map actions to them.

Software

Galaxy Watch has moved from Samsung’s Tizen OS to Google’s Wear OS since the Watch 4. This brings with it wider support for apps, and a tighter integration with Android.

I’ve found apps to work better on this watch than on the Tizen based Watch Active2. For instance, the Strava app was often flaky with GPS signals, but the few times I used it with this watch, it’s worked flawlessly. Even Samsung’s own camera app, which lets you remotely control the phone camera, used to crash or frequently fail to connect on the Active2, but has worked perfectly well here.

Health features

The watch comes with a handful of health features, but the two I pay attention to are sleep score and the energy score. Already, I’m seeing my sleep habits improving as I keep an eye on the scores and notice what’s hindering my sleep quality. The energy score is based on a few factors for the previous day including sleep quality, physical activity, etc. I’ve found it to reasonably reflect how I’m feeling on most days.

There’s also the AGEs index, which is supposed to show your metabolic age. For me, it constantly hovers in the middle, and feels gimmicky. The stress score is also not very useful. I’ve found it showing low stress levels on pretty stressful days.

Gestures

If you’re so inclined, you can set up the watch to respond to gestures, like shaking your wrist to dismiss, or mapping knock-knock and pinch gestures to specific actions. I didn’t find the gesture control to be intuitive enough to be useful.

Far too often, it would have false positives, where a timer would get dismissed because it incorrectly detected a shake-to-dismiss gesture. After the 100th time this happened, I disabled the feature completely.

NFC and payments

The Tizen versions of Galaxy watches only supported Samsung Pay, which isn’t widely accepted, so I was never able to use it. With the move to Wear OS and better integration with Android and Google services, I’m able to use Google Wallet with the watch now. Again, super useful in the winter months when the phone might be buried inside an inner jacket pocket.

One annoying thing I have encountered is when I bring my phone close to the watch, it accidentally scans it as an NFC tag. This happens because the watch thinks the phone is some exercise equipment and tries pairing with it. Disabling Samsung Health in the NFC connections settings prevents this from happening.

Watch 7 vs Watch Ultra

The Galaxy Watch 7 and the Ultra have essentially the same features, so the Watch 7 is much better value at almost half the price. The only big differences that mattered to me were the battery capacity, screen size and durability.

The Watch Ultra, with its 590mAh battery, can last much longer than the Watch 7’s 425mAh. That should last at least an extra day. This comes at the expense of size. The Ultra is much heavier (60.5g vs 33.8), but that affords it a larger screen size (47mm compared to 40 or 44mm versions).

There’s also the ruggedness that the Ultra’s titanium body provides. Aside from that, it can withstand more extreme conditions than the non-Ultra version. The ability to withstand -20C is nice for Canadian winters, but I don’t see myself needing to track 10ATM underwater or at 9000m altitude, so that’s mostly for the dedicated fitness enthusiasts.

Final thoughts

If you’re looking for a smartwatch today, the Apple Watch is an easy pick if you’re on IOS, but on the Android side, there are more options. However, the Galaxy watches seem to be a long ahead right now.

After 3 months of use, would I recommend the Watch Ultra? Probably not. It’s a great watch, but the much cheaper Watch 7 has most of the features and the Ultra is overkill for most people.

That said, I don’t regret getting it. The longer battery life was a big selling point for me, and recent software updates have pushed that even further. And with this build quality, it will hopefully last for years.