Galaxy Watch 7 - The Best Samsung Smartwatch to Buy

this right here is the brand new Samsung Galaxy watch 7 and even though the Galaxy watch Ultra was really the star of the show this is the watch that I would probably recommend for most people out there and it looks just like the previous Galaxy watch 6 but it actually has quite a few massive improvements inside this as well and like I said this is in many ways better than the Galaxy watch Ultra for most people out there it has the same chip inside the same new bioactive sensor the same display a lot of the

same new software in a package that is about half the weight and about half the price now this comes in two different colors there's green and either cream or silver depending on the size you get and there are two different sizes as well unlike the ultra which only comes in one size this comes in 40 or 44 mm so smaller wrists are definitely going to favor this watch anyway when you buy it there are three different band options available uh there's a sport band which I have right here it's a soft silicone I really like

it it's very comfortable I'm not sure I'm the biggest fan of the the kind of thread Act Accent on either side the orange and the blue it does match the new Galaxy buds though they have like an orange and blue thing going on so I don't know across the lineup it's kind of nice to match but whatever you can swap out the band very easily there's also a fabric or an athleisure band you can get uh when you pre-order this or when you order it anywhere in any store and what I really think is pretty

beneficial about this compared to the ultra is that the band removal mechanism is different from the ultra which means the straps on here will not work on the ultra and the ultra straps will not work on this this if you flip it over to the back you see the ultra has a new mechanism where you press it and the whole strap the disconnects it's a proprietary strap and you there's probably not a lot of thirdparty ones at launch but this is a very very standard strap when you buy this watch you can go on Amazon

and the same day just buy you know there's hundreds of thousands available so you can choose any watch strap you want it's a very common 20mm pin strap so you can just push this little button take it off and swap it out for metal or leather or whatever you want and at a very cheap price as well there's a lot of these are just a couple dollars to buy as I mentioned this does come in two different sizes but the strap's going to be 20 millimet either way and the price of this is also half

the price approximately half of the Galaxy watch Ultra so the price of the ultra is $650 the watch 7 the smaller one starts at $299 so that's it that's literally less than half the price and Samsung's always doing some promotions I'll have a link down below uh you can get at least in the pre-order phase I think you can get an enhanced $250 tradeing credit you get a free spare band uh and you get a 20% student discount if you are a student of course so that helps the channel out if you want to go

through that link and get that promotion I'll have that in the description and in a pinned comment uh at least if you want to like check out the colors and and the price and stuff like that also it's worth noting that there are two versions available for all sizes here uh there is a GPS only version like Bluetooth Wi-Fi GPS or the version that also has LTE if you want to be getting phone calls when you're not connected to your phone or connected to Wi-Fi then LTE is usually about an extra 50ish do added on

to the price of the watch looking at the body itself the actual design here like I said pretty familiar still an aluminum design still ip68 water resistance still five atmospheres of water resistance as well the ultra is 10 so if you're diving a little deeper the ultra will be better but for surface water swimming for you know swimming laps and stuff like that this is definitely good enough we have a sapphire crystal face uh and you'll notice that like aluminum is a pretty soft metal the raised face on here is also a little bit exposed

so I would definitely recommend being very cautious with this if you're wearing it for example rock climbing I already damaged two similar designs in the past the watch 4 and the Watch 2 active both while rock climbing um so definitely be really careful about the edges on here or maybe just get a case you can find a case to cover this and kind of protect those edges a little bit as well the display is either 1.31 in or 1.47 in uh obviously depending on the size you get it's a Super AMOLED and they both come

with about 330 pixels per inch that's a lot of numbers speaking just from experience here you can see we have a pretty good screen to body ratio I think it it's really it looks nice it feels nice the display I'm happy with it Samsung always does a pretty good job with their displays and because we have kind of a space around the outside that gives us some room to run our finger around there to use the digital rotating bezel because this doesn't have obviously anything that physically rotates on the watch it's a very simple and

minimal watch so the digital rotating bezel really helps to navigate the UI and we'll get into the UI later in the video but there is a lot that rotating just helps to navigate it it's kind of built around that on the right side you'll see we have our two buttons this is very familiar these will be used for your ECG if you want to use if you're going to like measure your heart and stuff like that also for Bio impedance to estimate your body composition um and of course the buttons do all their normal stuff

which of course we'll talk about in the UI segment of this video flipping over to the back we do have a new bioactive sensor on here here this is the same new one we're seeing on the watch Ultra which is awesome to see on the regular watch 7 here and I mean spoiler it is very very accurate still measuring all the stuff we know like heart rate um blood oxygen temperature things like that um you can you know estimate cycle tracking and things like all types of things like that but the heart rate tracking like

man it is is very very impressive I compared it to a Garmin watch um which is you know like a lot of very elite athletes are using like the Garmin epics for example and this thing Can it can hold its own it really keeps up with that talking about some other cool things we have within the software realm of this there is a lot that Samsung added here there's a couple things they added only to the ultra but looking at this one the big one they're talking a lot about is the energy score this is

very similar to like Fitbit has something similar uh Garmin has the body battery essentially it's going to give you a single just one number that kind of boils down what it estimates your Readiness will be for for like a workout or anything that could be strenuous so so if you sleep really well your score goes up if you have a lot of stress your score goes down if you had a bunch of good workouts and then a nice rest day you might have a higher score today and the idea there is that if you are

you know if you maybe you're just tired throughout the day or you just stressed or something you're confused you don't know like all right can I work out really hard today then you could look at this score and maybe if it's higher than you expected you it could just motivate you and say you know what yeah I actually did sleep well last night I should push myself I shouldn't skip this workout and ideally you can push yourself a little bit more but I do recommend kind of take you with a grain of salt because the

opposite can also be true sometimes you know your body best you feel good you're ready to work out and it might just give you a low score I recommend don't let that get in your head I've seen people do this where they look at it and they're like oh man I didn't sleep well I'm tired like I'm stressed and then they end up like kind of getting in their own head and and it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy there so kind of weird uh how that relates to psychology but it can be you know kind of

a useful little index just don't put too much value on it other software things though you can create workout routines for this which I think is a really cool workaround uh because the ultra has like a triathlon mode where you can do multiport but this you can just make a routine a workout routine which is meant for like you know bicep curls bench press stuff like that but you can totally just do it with like Swim Bike Run and then you you have a triathon like that's it you have a multisport on this and it

works well like it's not the same as the ultra it's not baked in here with an with the thing but you can save it as a preset and name it like my Triathlon and then you have that additionally we do have advanced sleep tracking on here so I mean sleep tracking has always been pretty solid on the Samsung watches now we have some sleep apnea tracking if your phone's around you still have the snoring tracking kind of a big picture as well as some sleep coaching as well and some Wellness insights uh just kind of

summarizing and and interpreting the data for you to say hey you didn't sleep well last night because you have sleep apnea maybe you should see a doctor and uh get that checked out it really could have a pretty big impact on your life and probably one of my favorite new features on here and this one's so subtle but it's such a good quality of life Improvement for me is the AI suggested repes probably the best way for generative AI to be used on a watch it's kind of like the only way I can think that

would really make sense and that is rather than having a couple quick replies like yes no maybe I'll talk to you later this is going to read the context of your text your conversation and it's going to suggest replies according to that so you're going to have things that just make more sense rather than always having to type out a reply on a tiny little keyboard here we also have some cool gestures added to this so some kind of removed as well there used to be like a weird like weird one that you moved your

hand up and down I think everyone kind of laughed at that one but now we have double pinch to answer calls to play pause music stuff like that take photos we also have a knock knock gesture you just like flip your wrist down it's like you're knocking it's kind of self-explanatory I have that set to open a workout um although sometimes you have to like really work at it and and get that like it doesn't always read it perfectly the first time and sometimes I find it's easier just to just navigate the interface anyway and

the third one is going to be like the double shake to reject a phone call I think that one's pretty beneficial if you're like cooking your hands are dirty just do that real quick and you can you know reject a phone call also when you're wearing this you can extend the life of the the ring the battery life of your of your Galaxy Ring by up to about 30% so it's kind of a little bit redundant if you wear both devices I'll talk about that in a future video but you can get an extended battery

life if you're wearing both of them the ring will last like about 10 days instead of seven all right so getting into an accuracy analysis this does have dualband GPS which as you can see does a pretty good job of tracking exactly where I ran uh I had several different workouts where I ran I biked I did you know walks different stuff like that and it always tracked very very accurately and the benefit of dual band GPS is that you are able to track more accurately in difficult environments not just Open Fields which is already

going to be fairly easy for for just single band GPS but tool here is going to work if you're in a city if you're in a very mountainous region and I found that it absolutely did a fantastic job and a really cool Improvement that they added to this watch is that different workouts have different starts uh by default which is something I've been complaining about in the previous watches quite a bit and having that fixed here I think is a big win where by default if you open up a run it's going to be manual

start instead of countdown which means you have time to lock in the GPS it actually shows you a map of where you are once the GPS locks in which instills confidence it lets you know that it definitely is locked in on the right place and then you can start running and it tracks very accurately in the past you had to go into settings to enable that or else it would just do 3 to1 start going maybe it doesn't even have GPS locked in yet and you might not have GPS for the first minute of your

run so I think that's beneficial that they have that by default for certain workouts like running whereas others like a walk for example I don't really care if the GPS locks in for the first minute I'm not walking fast anyway so it's not going to be like that off if it sets in like a minute later and so that just does a 321 start an automatic countdown for that so I think that's a really cool very smart way just feels very well thought out for how they constructed the different workouts so taking a look at

the heart rate I want to show you three different graphs the first one being simply a comparison between the Galaxy watch 7 and The Polar h10 ECG heart rate strap which is known to be quite accurate that's our reference in this in this comparison here and as you can see on the left half of the graph during a steady state run it did a pretty decent job the pickup in the very beginning lagged a little bit but for the most part it was step for step approximately accurate and equal to the polar h10 however when

on the right half of the graph where you see those spikes I was doing some fairly short interval Sprints where I got my heart rate very high and then walked and then got it high and then low and as you can see here as a very common problem for optical heart rate sensors they really do struggle with this a lot of wrist-based SmartWatches for example uh tend to lag when you're doing these Sprint intervals and sure enough this galaxy watch 7 did just that however it did seem to catch up reasonably quickly so if you're

doing longer intervals longer than these short little minute long Sprints uh you might notice that it it would potentially catch up eventually but it does lag for sure now looking at a second chart here again just comparing the Galaxy watch 7 to the polar h10 this is a steadystate run about 20 minutes long and for the most part it did a really decent job almost exactly dead on with this occasionally some lag when my heart rate changed if I was running up a hill or something but but you did I did notice there were some

missing data points even though I wore the watch at the correct height above my wrist at the correct tightness and everything I I'm not entirely sure why it was missing a couple data points there um maybe that's going to be something fixed with a firmware update but for now that is something I noticed now the third graph here you can see just adding in the Garmin epics uh this is the pro two or the 2 Pro uh and so this is going to be generally a reference for what is considered one of the best wrist-based

heart rate sensors out there uh and you can see it is marginally better than the Galaxy watch 7 but the Galaxy watch 7 definitely holds its own as a reasonably accurate Fitness tracker specifically if you're doing steady state runs talking about what's under the hood however there's a lot to really like about there's some pretty big improvements here so we now have on all the watches 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage so if you are like me and you like to download Spotify songs onto onto your watch and run with your earbuds

which by the way it also has Bluetooth 5.3 for your earbuds 32 gigs is pretty nice I can download a huge library of Music rather than always putting down a playlist removing the other one and kind of managing my storage 32 gigs like I could get all my music on here this also has a superior chip to the previous generation should be much faster it's the w1000 which is a five core chip it's 3 NM as well and it's the same one we're seeing on the ultra and even though you have the same chip on

here you can kind of start thinking about this same chip same display size but smaller battery than the ultra you're not going to be getting that that 100 battery claim that we're getting on the ultra because the battery is definitely substantially smaller on the larger model here which has the same size screen and basically all the same stuff it's 435 mamp hours compared to 590 on the ultra the smaller version is 300 mamp hours so I think you could probably expect a solid easily a day probably a day and a half maybe if you're really

cautious with your usage you could maybe stretch it to two days but I think most people are going to be charging this maybe every morning when they shower they brush their teeth just put on a charger for a little bit uh so you can still track your sleep and still you know have the watch running all day long kind of getting into a quick little UI tour for anybody who hasn't used a watch like this in the past essentially you can touch and hold the watch face and you'll see we do have a couple new

ones that come with the watch I really like the one by default just looks clean very minimal you can see on the right side like the UV index is the default on the left side my step count but you can customize those as much as you would like if you swipe down our quick settings are still there they all look the same as they did in the past if you swipe up from the bottom these are all our different apps and of course you could use that rotating digital bezel like I said to navigate this

as well as most apps on here swiping from the left are your notifications and from the right are your different widgets these are pretty much all the same you'll see energy score is over here as well that is a new one they just added obviously and a nice little Health profile you can see like your heart rate your step count and different things like that I do wish you could customize this a little bit more like this little Health snapshot I love that I love how you can see four things at once I wish you

could customize that and choose four different things maybe like the temperature uh like you know different things about the weather or different things like that like if you can customize it because we have a pretty nice display here I think we could show more information just Than Just Energy score like I think that's a little bit of a waste of some real estate there but kind of in summary that's the Galaxy watch 7 I think there's a lot of improvements even though it looks the same as the watch 6 there's a lot that I really

like not just software improvements but also some Hardware improvements some accuracy improvements across the board it's just a better watch compared to the six and in many ways even though the watch Ultra is technically a better watch this is probably a better buy you're getting basically the same watch slightly shorter battery life but half the weight and about half the price so all that link down below if you guys want to check out the latest price Samsung I can't even like the price has changed so much I don't even know when you're watching this it

could be full price it could be half price I don't know but let me know what your thoughts are on the Galaxy watch 7 and uh what you would like me to compare it to if you enjoyed the video consider subscribing thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video