Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra Review: The Ultimate Wear OS Smartwatch for Outdoor Enthusiasts

Introduction

Samsung has outdone itself with the release of the Galaxy Watch Ultra, a premium smartwatch designed for the most demanding outdoor enthusiasts. Priced at $748 at Red White Mobile Singapore, this rugged Wear OS watch offers superior build quality, a bright display, and responsive, customizable controls. It also includes detailed sleep analysis, AI-powered health insights, and comprehensive multisport tracking. While its price tag is steep, the Galaxy Watch Ultra’s features and performance make it a standout in the smartwatch market. In this review, we’ll explore its key features, compare it to other popular smartwatches, and help you decide if it’s the right fit for your needs.

Build Quality: Especially Rugged Hardware

Durable Design for Extreme Conditions

Samsung bills the Galaxy Watch Ultra as durable enough for adventures, boasting several technical advantages over its predecessor, the Galaxy Watch 7. The Watch Ultra features a titanium body instead of an aluminum one and has a 10ATM water-resistance rating, allowing it to be submerged at depths of up to 328 feet in calm fresh or saltwater. This is a significant improvement over the Watch 7’s 5ATM rating, which allows for submersion up to 164 feet. Additionally, the Watch Ultra can withstand extreme altitudes ranging from 1,640 feet below sea level to 29,527 feet above it, making it ideal for mountain climbing and diving.

Both the Watch Ultra and Watch 7 are impervious to dust and water exposure, thanks to their IP68 ratings. They also meet the MIL-STD-810H certification, meaning they can endure extreme temperature changes, blowing sand, and other environmental stressors such as vibration and shock. Samsung claims both models can function between -4 and 131 degrees Fahrenheit.

The enhanced durability of the Watch Ultra makes it suitable for a wide range of outdoor activities, from climbing to hiking to mountain biking. However, it’s important to note that the increased water rating doesn’t mean it’s suitable for water sports like scuba diving or jet skiing. The fine print specifies that the device isn’t suitable for water sports, with the 10ATM rating relating more to the pressure from water rather than the water itself.

Comparing to the Apple Watch Ultra 2

The Watch Ultra keeps up with its clear inspiration, the Apple Watch Ultra 2. Apple’s adventure watch shares the same military equipment certification and altitude range but is much more suitable for water activities thanks to its superior WR100 water pressure rating and EN13319 certification (the international standard for diving accessories). The Apple Watch Ultra 2 can handle diving and jet skiing with ease and even includes a diving computer for undersea expeditions.

Specs and Features: Key Upgrades Over the Watch 7

Superior Display and Performance

The Galaxy Watch Ultra features a bright 1.5-inch, 480-by-480-pixel Super AMOLED screen that’s easy to see even in direct sunlight, thanks to its 3,000 nits of brightness. This is on par with the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and significantly brighter than the Galaxy Watch 7, which has 2,000 nits.

The Watch Ultra is powered by a 3nm Exynos W1000 processor with 2GB of memory and 32GB of storage. It runs on Google’s Wear OS 5 software with Samsung’s One UI 6 interface, offering performance and efficiency advancements over previous versions. In addition to LTE connectivity, the Galaxy Watch Ultra includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3, and NFC for mobile payments.

Enhanced GPS and Health Tracking

One of the standout features of the Watch Ultra is its dual-frequency GPS, which provides better location tracking in challenging areas surrounded by tall buildings or trees. This is a significant improvement over previous models and ensures more accurate tracking for outdoor activities.

The Watch Ultra also includes an improved BioActive sensor with more LEDs for even more accurate health metric readings. It can measure metrics like body composition, stress levels, ECG, blood pressure monitoring, irregular heart rate detection, and sleep apnea. The new AGEs Index feature helps users track their body’s biological aging process and provides insights into metabolic health.

AI-Powered Health Insights

Thanks to Galaxy AI, the Watch Ultra encapsulates all of its tracked fitness and sleep metrics into a holistic Energy Score on a scale from 0 to 100. Galaxy AI then provides Wellness Tips that offer guidance on how to improve your score and feel better. It measures the amount of sleep you get, along with your blood oxygen level, heart rate, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and sleep stages. For snoring detection, you need to keep your Samsung phone nearby. If you run a consistent route while exercising, the Watch Ultra can even learn your pattern so that you can race against yourself.

Customizable Quick Button and Multisport Tracking

The Watch Ultra includes a customizable Quick Button and an 85db siren. It contains 13 LEDs and an improved BioActive Sensor for more precise heart rate readings and better sleep tracking. It even has a multisport tile for tracking triathlons and can calculate your maximum cycling power (called Functional Power Threshold) in four minutes if you pair your phone with your bike’s power meter.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 also has a customizable button called an Action Button and a slightly louder 86db siren, but it doesn’t detect snoring, sleep apnea, or AGEs. In the US, it can’t monitor blood oxygen saturation.

Setup and Controls: User-Friendly Interface

Easy Setup and Customization

During testing, the bigger screen on the Galaxy Watch Ultra and its customizable Quick Button stood out. Setting up the Quick Button to open the My Exercises app was straightforward, but you can also configure it to turn on the watch’s water lock, start a stopwatch, or turn on the watch’s flashlight. You can activate the watch’s siren by holding this button for five seconds.

Hold the power button to turn your watch on and get started with the setup. If you have a Samsung phone, you should see a pop-up that prompts you to pair the watch. Otherwise, you can pair the watch via your phone’s regular Bluetooth menu. Either way, you need to sign in to Samsung’s Galaxy Wearable app with your Google account next.

Responsive Touch Screen and Gestures

You can control the watch via the touch screen. Swipe down from the top to show a customizable Quick Panel with options such as Do Not Disturb and Energy Saver. Swipe up for your apps, to the right for notifications, and to the left for a customizable arrangement of tiles with options like Calendar, Fitness Stats, and Weather. New for this generation, you can use gestures like double-tapping your fingers, knocking your fist, and rotating your wrist to snap pictures or answer calls.

Battery Life: Improved, But Not Spectacular

Extended Battery Performance

The Watch Ultra has a 590mAh battery, a sizable step up from the 425mAh and 300mAh cells for the 44mm and 40mm versions of the Watch 7. According to Samsung, the Watch Ultra should last 60 hours without any power-saving modes active, 100 hours in the standard power-saving mode, and 48 hours in the exercise power-saving mode.

The watch lasted just over 46 hours in a battery rundown test, in which the always-on display was active, no power-saving modes were used, and a 30-minute run with the GPS was included. The watch’s Sleep Mode (turns off the screen and silences notifications) was used during the roughly seven-hour stretches of sleep over the two nights within that period.

Charging and Power-Saving Modes

The Watch Ultra recharged from 1% to 100% in a reasonable two hours, which exceeded the 88 minutes the Galaxy Watch 7 required to recharge. That makes sense given the larger battery size. Charging was done with the included cable, but the Watch Ultra does support wireless charging.

Health and Exercise: Holistic, Detailed Insights

Comprehensive Health Monitoring

The Galaxy Watch Ultra delivers better holistic health monitoring than the Watch 7 since you can wear it for more than a full 24-hour cycle. During testing, both the AI-generated Energy Score and Wellness Tips made sense in the context of daily life.

The Energy Score encapsulates the amount and quality of your sleep alongside your activity from the previous day to assess your well-being. One day, I earned a score of 63 out of 100; it docked me for getting too much exercise. The Wellness Tip noted that because I was active for so much longer than my average, it could lead to overexertion. The day before, I earned a 68. The Wellness Tip that day centered around my high heart rate when I went to bed.

Accurate Exercise Tracking

The Galaxy Watch Ultra provides tons of detail about the exercises it tracks. Using the multisport exercise tile is simple and intuitive. You can pick a preset trio if training for a triathlon (swimming, biking, running), a duathlon (running, biking, running), or an aquathlon (running, swimming, running). You can also create a custom trio with options including biking, indoor biking, mountain biking, open-water swimming, pool swimming, outdoor running, and treadmill running.

To track recovery, the Galaxy Watch Ultra shows your heart rate for the two minutes after a workout and compares it with your heart rate at the end of the workout.

Body and Sleep Metrics: Mostly Accurate

Body Composition and Sleep Tracking

Measuring your body composition requires you to wear the watch, put the ring finger and middle finger of your opposite hand on the two buttons, and hold your arms up. You also need to enter your weight so it can get an accurate reading. The numbers from the Galaxy Watch Ultra are similar to those from the Watch 7.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra’s sleep monitoring was tested against the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and a nearby Nest Hub for three nights. Despite its large size, the Galaxy Watch Ultra didn’t bother me while I was asleep. The sleep stages chart showed a strange gap in the data on two of the testing nights, similar to the gap observed when testing the Watch 7, but the numbers still ended up close to the readings from the Apple and Nest devices.

Verdict: The Most Durable, Feature-Rich Wear OS Watch

The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra should hold plenty of appeal if you’re training for a triathlon or are currently planning your next mountain biking trip: It’s quite durable and very capable of accurately tracking a wide range of exercise metrics. This model also has quite a few advantages over the Galaxy Watch 7, namely, much longer battery life, a brighter screen, and a customizable Quick Button. Finally, its AI-based health metrics and advanced sleep tracking keep it ahead of Wear OS competitors. All of those features come at a very high cost and result in a large watch size, however, so most Android users should still buy the more affordable and slimmer Watch 7. And if you are on the Apple side of things, you can rest easy knowing that the Watch Ultra 2 still has the edge on battery life and for extreme water sports.

NETWORK

Technology
GSM / HSPA / LTE
2G bands GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G bands HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1700(AWS) / 1900 / 2100
4G bands LTE
Speed HSPA, LTE

BODY

Dimensions 47.4 x 47.4 x 12.1 mm (1.87 x 1.87 x 0.48 in)
Weight 60.5 g (2.15 oz)
Build Sapphire crystal front, ceramic/sapphire crystal back, titanium frame (grade 4)
SIM eSIM
IP68 / 10 ATM certified
100m water resistant (up to 10 min)
MIL-STD 810H certified
ECG certified

DISPLAY

Type Super AMOLED
Size 1.5 inches
Resolution 480 x 480 pixels (~327 ppi density)
Protection Sapphire crystal glass
Always-on display

PLATFORM

OS Android Wear OS 5, One UI Watch 6
Chipset Exynos W1000 (3 nm)
CPU Penta-core
GPU Mali-G68

MEMORY

Card slot No
Internal 32GB 2GB RAM

CAMERA

No

SOUND

Loudspeaker Yes
3.5mm jack No

COMMS

WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, dual-band
Bluetooth 5.3, A2DP, LE
Positioning GPS (L1+L5), GLONASS, GALILEO, BDS
NFC Yes
Radio No
USB No

FEATURES

Sensors Accelerometer, gyro, heart rate, barometer, altimeter, compass, SpO2, temperature (body), temperature (water), BioActive

BATTERY

Type Li-Ion 590 mAh, non-removable
Charging 10W wireless (Qi)

Disclaimer. We can not guarantee that the information on this page is 100% correct.