'Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra' review: An interesting addition to the premium smartwatch segment

The premium segment in the smartwatch space is largely aimed towards serious fitness and outdoor sports enthusiasts. You have the likes of Garmin and Suunto in the premium range and not that long back Apple entered the segment, and now we also have Samsung.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra (WiFi + 4G/LTE) model that I have tried for a few days is currently priced at Rs. 59,999 and isn’t the costliest compared to the names mentioned above, but it does have to be performing really well and give accurate readings in order to really stand out in that group.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra comes in 47mm size and three different colour options – Titanium Silver, Titanium Gray and Titanium White.

The first thing I noticed about the watch, same as when Samsung had just launched it, is its size – thickness and diameter. There is some titanium on the back and front with grade 2 titanium plus plastic making most of the watch and comes with IP68 dust and water resistance. Weighing a little over 60 grams, it features a 1.5-inch rounded display with as many as three buttons on the right (wearing it on your left wrist) – Quick button, Home button, and back button.

The quick button in the middle has been added as a shortcut to any app or workout you want to start with a single tap. The buttons are also large and convenient to press. It may be a little large for some people and isn’t perhaps the best watch in terms of how it feels on the wrist at first that I have used from Samsung but it didn’t feel like a big deal once I started using it.

The squircle-designed (nearly) 1.5-inch Super AMOLED (480x480) display is brighter than before and is sharp enough for your watch contents – short messages, notifications, maps navigation, steps and of course watch faces. You would be able to check stuff when outdoors under sunlight without much trouble. The straps are not difficult to put on once you get the hang of the mechanism, which takes like a minute (longer nails might help, too).

I tried the marine strap and there is two more options called trail and peakform. Under the hood, there’s 5-core 1 .5Ghz processor, 2GB RAM and 32GB internal storage plus plenty of sensors—accelerometer, barometer, bioelectrical impedance analysis sensor, electrical and optical heart rate sensor, infrared temperature sensor and the more usual ones like gyro sensor, geomagnetic sensor and light sensor.

I haven’t tried many of the workout modes and activities that are supported. Running on WearOS 5 with Samsung’s One UI 6.0 on top, the watch has been smooth and responsive during my usage with fluid animations and apps running quite smoothly.

Swiping down on the home screen brings you connectivity options and settings; swiping up gives you all your apps at one place; swiping from left to right takes you to all your pending notifications and from the right to left brings you to health reading, step counts and further activities if you swipe the same way again. Long-pressing both back and home buttons switched on the siren, which is aimed at emergency situations or such.

In my brief experience so far – the heart rate is read quite accurately in terms of BPM, and steps count isn’t too bad either with accurate steps given when walking briskly outdoors or indoors in match an Apple Watch series 7. It shows target achievement notifications as and when done for running or walking reliably, too.

There is neat Energy Score that combines several data points such as sleep time, sleeping heart rate variability and full day’s activity, which remained within a small range, not changing much with minute activity changes in the day. You can also have Strava’s GPX files for uploading route workouts.

The watch is powered by a 590mAh battery unit, and it lasted me two days with exercise power saving and GPS turned on and another day with power-saving enabled. You can expect to charge it fully in nearly two hours. If you are an outdoors, adventurous and fitness-enthusiast kind of a person, you now have another mainstream option among smartwatches to choose from. It would definitely make more sense if you have an Android phone, especially a recent Samsung one, to take full advantage of all the nitty gritty features and connectivity options the Galaxy Watch Ultra has to offer.