To learn more about the benefits wearing the Galaxy Watch brings to daily life, the Newsroom got hands-on with the latest device in Samsung’s wearables lineup.

Wear the Galaxy Watch Your Way

With a design that embraces the look and feel of luxury watches, the Galaxy Watch’s trademark bezel is more detailed than before. The smartwatch also caters to more preferences, as it is available in three different colors and two different sizes, Midnight Black (42mm), Rose Gold (42mm) and Silver (46mm), allowing you to personalize the device to suit your style or mood, from classic workwear to relaxed vacation looks.

The Galaxy Watch comes in three colors, Midnight Black (42mm), Rose Gold (42mm), and Silver (46mm)

Each device comes with a silicone strap that winds smoothly around the wrist. Heightening customizability, three 22mm and eight 20mm original watch straps are available for purchase separately, with 14 more watch band options launched in collaboration with Switzerland’s Braloba in a range of materials, colors, and styles. The Galaxy Watch can also be fitted with standard watch straps¹.

Setting different watch faces can transform the appearance of the Galaxy Watch. The 12 pre-loaded faces allow you to tailor your device to your mood in moments, while the approximately 60,000 additional faces available for download via the Galaxy Apps store provide limitless opportunities for adding your own personal flair.

The Galaxy Watch can be customized with a range of different watch face designs and features

You can easily change your watch face on the Galaxy Watch itself or from a paired smartphone. There are also features, known as complications, that let the watch face show more just the time and date – and can be adjusted according to users’ preferences.

Complications can be set to display important information such as device battery life, the weather, the date, daily step count, heart rate, and more

Intelligent Connectivity

The Galaxy Watch is equipped with a host of intuitive features that allow you to navigate the device with ease. The smartwatch’s screen will turn on as you raise your wrist, ready for you to view the information you need instantly. You can also explore installed apps by rotating the bezel, which allows for greater navigation control.

No need to access your phone directly – the smartwatch enables you to make simple phone calls or reply to messages and vibrates lightly to notify you of incoming phone calls, messages, and alerts. What’s more, when the Galaxy Watch is connected to Wifi or LTE, you can check your smartphone’s app notifications directly on the watch screen even while the phone is far away.

To reply to messages from your Galaxy Watch, you can select an answer from a variety of pre-drafted messages, type your response on the keyboard or use the built-in microphone to transform your voice into text. The Galaxy Watch can intuitively recommend appropriate responses, increasing your convenience.

The Galaxy Watch recommends appropriate responses, highlighting its recommended messages in blue

Pairing the Galaxy Watch and a smartphone is straightforward. Once you’ve downloaded and installed the Galaxy Wearable app on your smartphone, it will detect the smartwatch and prompt you to sync the two devices with each other. The Galaxy Watch is compatible with both Android and iOS smartphones².

Wearing the Galaxy Watch allows you to pay less attention to your smartphone while on the move. You can place your phone out of sight in your pocket or bag, knowing that you can receive notifications and send replies straight from the smartwatch’s screen.

From Well-being Partner to Personal Assistant

The Galaxy Watch helps you to manage your day, providing schedule reminders and encouraging you to meet your health and wellness goals.

The Newsroom found the smartwatch’s advanced sleep tracker particularly useful, as the Galaxy Watch monitors four levels of sleep, including REM cycles, helping wearers to adjust their sleeping habits and get the rest they need.

The device’s inactive time alerts remind wearers who have been sitting for a prolonged period of time to stand up and move around. The alerts suggest simple stretching exercise and provide little messages of encouragement to keep you motivated.

With a variety of automatic sensors, the Galaxy Watch can monitor the wearer’s real-time health information. The smartwatch detects details such as your heart rate, global position and movements to measure and analyze your health status. The device’s accelerometer sensor, gyro sensor and the heart rate sensor can automatically recognize six types of activity – including walking, running and riding a bicycle, amongst others. The Galaxy Watch will begin to record information after 10 consecutive minutes of an activity and analyzes total activity to provide feedback for the wearer.

Heart rate and accelerometer sensors track wearers’ sleep and categorize their status into four stages: ‘Deep,’ ‘REM,’ ‘Light,’ and ‘Awake.’ Monitor this data on the Galaxy Watch or via the Samsung Health app

The Galaxy Watch enables wearers to manage their time efficiently, with the ‘My Day’ watch face offering a clear overview of your daily schedule at a single glance and highlighting your appointment times at the edges of the dial. Synced to your smartphone’s calendar, the My Day watch face is designed to help you focus on a healthy work-life balance.

Acting as your very own personal assistant, your Galaxy Watch prepares useful information briefings for you twice a day. The morning briefing is issued just after you typically wake up, providing details about the day’s weather and schedule. The evening briefing notifies wearers of any pending events amongst their reminders, offers a summary of health and activity data for that day, and displays the next day’s forecast.

Endlessly tailorable and designed to meet your needs, the Galaxy Watch is ushering in a new era of wearables. The device is truly standalone, redefining freedom and connectivity, while helping you to achieve your ideal lifestyle balance.

¹The Galaxy Watch is compatible with 20mm and 22mm standard watch straps for its 42mm and 46mm models, respectively.

²The Galaxy Watch is compatible with smartphones supporting Android OS 5.0 and above or iOS 9.0 and above. iOS smartphone users should to download the ‘Galaxy Watch’ application from iTunes.

To learn more about the story behind the wearable, the Newsroom team sat down with the designers of the Galaxy Watch – Tommy Choi, Hyemin Bae, Jaehyung Hong and Sanhui Oh – as they introduced the new addition to the Galaxy family of devices.

Q. The Galaxy Watch showcases a wide array of new options, with two different sizes and various colors available. How did you approach designing the new Galaxy Watch?

A. The newest Galaxy Watch’s design focused on millennials, a generation that prioritizes stylishness and loves being active without bounds. Our answer to the needs of this generation was an outer design that covers a wide range of styles – from classical moods with elegance to casual moods with a dose of freedom. We also made sure to preserve the legacy of the real watch philosophy that we have held over the years to instill the watch with a complete identity.

The design embodies the spirit of activeness, inspired by the remarkably sporty racing watch. The index design with the inverted triangle is one of the results of this design. The tip of the index triangle is designed to precisely align with the hands of the watch so that users can accurately tell time even in active and dynamic conditions.

Q. What kinds of changes were made to its outer design?

A. Whereas the previous model featured a more masculine identity with its weighty body and bold thickness, the Galaxy Watch puts focus on micro details to create a more sensitive design. This design has a tight-knit and low-cut knurling finish of the bezel to minimize malfunctions and create a natural style suitable for women as well.

Q. How does the strap accentuate the Galaxy Watch’s design?

A. We tried to capture not only the style of the Galaxy Watch, but also the various preferences of our users with the strap. The silicon strap features a new stripe pattern design that wraps around your wrist to express a sense of speediness and activity.

Furthermore, each product comes with straps in multiple colors, which users can mix and match with the body to give a unique makeover of the Galaxy Watch’s mood.

Q. Could you elaborate further on the multiple color combinations available?

A. The 46mm Silver’s Onyx Black, Deep Ocean Blue, and Basalt Gray straps bring an exquisite finish to the product’s charm. The 42mm Midnight Black comes with Onyx Black, Lunar Gray, Terracotta Red, Lime Yellow, and Cosmo Purple straps, and the 42mm Rose Gold can be paired with Pink Beige, Cloud Gray, and Natural Brown straps for users to blend different colors and express distinctive moods for every occasion.

These colorful Galaxy Watch straps can be matched with the Galaxy Note9’s case as well, so users can stylize their smartphone and smart watch with a singular visual identity.

Q. How did you take concerns such as battery life into consideration?

A. The Galaxy Watch isn’t a device you can easily and regularly charge as you would with a smartphone, so there has always been a consumer need for a longer battery life. That’s why we put a lot of effort into the battery every time we released a new product in the series. With a 10nm (nanometer) chipset, the Galaxy Watch’s processor is smaller and consumes less power than previous models – but it is also more powerful than ever before. The Galaxy Watch 46mm model, for example, can achieve 80+ hours of battery life with typical usage¹.

Q. Were there any other changes to the hardware?

A. The Galaxy Watch’s hardware has gone through a comprehensive transformation. The most noticeable part is the sensor located on the back of the product. We increased the number of rear sensors that touch the body to more precisely and quickly detect information regarding user conditions. On the other hand, we decreased the surface area of the sensor that touches the skin and designed it to protrude slightly to better detect user conditions, while eliminating inconveniences such as the accumulation of humidity.

In the evolution of the wearable device, the Galaxy Watch now encompasses the smart lifestyle. The Galaxy Watch is the perfect complement to Millennials, never ceasing to take on the new challenges of the unknown.

¹ Typical Usage: Galaxy Watch 46mm up to 80+ hours; Galaxy Watch 42mm up to 48+ hours. Battery life with typical usage using combined actions including notifications (55 times), checking time (56 times), checking text messages (25 times), talk time (13 minutes), music streaming (15 minutes), workouts (30 minutes), basic controls (30 minutes) and sleep mode