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Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 refined the Wear OS experience
With the launch of Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5, the company refined the experience on Wear OS over the previous best watch, the Galaxy Watch 4, which is why it was easy to see why our reader’s selected the Galaxy Watch 5 as their choice for the best smartwatch award this year. Samsung took what was already an excellent device and simply made it better. All without really changing too much.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, Samsung left much of what wasn’t broken alone, and focused on improving the basics. Like battery life and performance. If there’s any area where the Galaxy Watch 4 series needed improvement, it was these two. And while performance is really only marginally better (mostly the same in our opinion), the battery life was significantly improved. And to us, this is the most important thing Samsung could have focused on.
The Galaxy Watch 5 can now last up to 50 hours on a single charge based on Samsung’s claims. And while it didn’t last that long for us, it did get to between 40 and 45. Which is about two days. We’d wager, that readers like the battery life upgrade as well.
Longer battery life and quicker charge times make the Galaxy watch 5 a daily driver
Longer battery life is definitely one of if not the best upgrade the Galaxy Watch 5 received over the Galaxy Watch 4. But it’s not the only upgrade. Samsung also made improvements to the charge time. 30 minutes on the charger gets your watch to about 45% battery. Which is pretty quick. The watch can already last up to two days.
And with nearly half the battery life in half an hour, you can easily juice it back up in the time it takes to shower and have breakfast. Which likely means a full battery before you have to leave for work or wherever else you need to go. Additionally, the Galaxy Watch 5 also improves the performance of the sensors. So things like heart rate tracking and more have better accuracy.
Samsung made this improvement by adjusting the curvature of the of the watch case. This way the sensors make better contact with your skin. So in turn they’re able to perform better. And of course the Galaxy Watch 5 also comes with Wear OS 3.5 out of the box. Not to mention a more durable display thanks to the sapphire crystal glass.
All-in-all, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 is a worthy successor to the Galaxy Watch 4. And a device worthy of the AH Reader’s Choice award for best smartwatch of 2022. And we agree with the readers here.