Samsung outlines Galaxy Watch4: first Google WearOS Watch – full details

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Samsung today announced the Galaxy Watch 4, the first watch to use the new Google + Samsung version of Wear OS. This new (or slightly rebranded) operating system allows access to the Google Play Store, while Samsung also says it’s bringing the “best of” Tizen to the table as well (Samsung’s current smartwatch platform).

Today, Samsung launched an “Unpacked” event directly with the watch itself. This is noteworthy, given that the hour is usually set later in most major presentations, while this time the event opened literally right away when the hour and job were announced. Approximately 98% of this presentation focused on health and fitness.

Samsung has added a list of new health/fitness features, including monitoring body composition using just two fingers of touching the watch. In fact, they made extraordinary efforts to try and explain this and their alleged accuracy during the show. Seriously, no one has ever spent as much money on advanced computer graphics to get detailed video at the resolution of a viewing sensor, which Samsung just did. Furthermore, the company added both snoring tracking with blood oxygen tracking together, from a data visualization point of view.

So, let’s dive into all of these features a bit more.

Galaxy Watch4 fitness specifications:

Since you’re reading this site, you probably know that it focuses on sports and fitness. Thus, these are the things we will focus on here. It doesn’t mean much, since Samsung didn’t mention literally a single non-sporting feature other than access to Spotify and new buttons, during the presentation. And don’t worry, I’ll cover the second button in a second.

To start, the watch is called the “Galaxy Watch4” (there’s no space between the watch and 4, officially), and it’ll be available for pre-order today, with delivery on August 27. Prices are $249 for the base unit, and $349 for the classic-style unit. Effectively, the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active line becomes the “basic” unit, while the “Classic” unit resembles a regular Galaxy Watch, complete with a rotating bezel.

Speaking of the brand, Samsung officially says that the operating system is “Wear OS powered by Samsung”. It will be interesting to see how it stands out against watches other than Samsung. Note that Samsung says that a Galaxy phone is not required to use the Galaxy Watch4.

Focusing on all things health and fitness, here’s the quick bulleted version of what’s changed:

– Optical heart rate sensor has been brought closer to the wrist, to increase the accuracy of the heart rate sensor – Variable optical heart rate sensing system – Tracking snoring + blood oxygen levels while sleeping together (requires phone on bedside table) – Body composition measurement added For things like body fat and muscle mass Extended ECG zones/support Access Google Wear OS sports apps like Strava, Adidas and Swim.com Newly ‘improved’ compass for use in Google Maps

The first is the new optical heart rate sensor and platform, which they specifically note to bring closer to the wrist for better accuracy. Samsung has historically fallen behind others in terms of optical HR accuracy, and one of the best ways to increase accuracy is to eliminate potential light leakage between the wrist and the sensor.

From an apps standpoint, Samsung has highlighted a few sports specifically, including Strava, Swim.com, and Adidas. Then note that the apps can be accessed from the Google Play Store. Google Maps as well as various core Samsung apps such as Samsung Pay are also highlighted.

Samsung has highlighted that it will track blood oxygen during sleep along with tracking snoring, and specifically, overlay that data together. Snoring tracking requires your phone to be on a bedside table, and then the two pieces are fused together.

Interestingly, Samsung reported that users checked their sleep statistics a total of 800 million times over the past year. That’s actually not an impressive number in its context, since that would be a chance 365 times a year, which means if we’re talking about 10-20 million hours, people actually don’t use that function that much (over 2 million hours, that means That each person checks in daily, over 20 million hours, which means that only 1 out of 10 people checks per day). You can mix and match these stats in a million ways, but I thought that was intriguing.

Obviously, the main feature of the Galaxy Watch4 was the measurement of body composition. Samsung spent a lot of time in the presentation explaining how it works, including an extraordinary amount of technical detail and terminology (which I loved).

The new feature simply requires users to hold two fingers on the two buttons on their watch for 15 seconds, then use the electrical impedance (BIA) to measure body composition (such as body fat and muscle mass). This is similar in technology concept to most body composition scales we’ve seen for decades, except that Samsung says it’s actually accurate (it’s shown many times that body composition scales are mostly a crapshoot).

Interestingly enough, Samsung has been talking for a while about how it has experimented with different tech concepts related to body composition for a decade, including everything from wrist strap sensors to TV remote controls.

Samsung has talked about how typically speaking the smaller the sensor pads (electrodes) for electrical resistance, the less accurate they are — which is why they never found the accuracy they were looking for. So when it was scaled down to little watch buttons, they said things went down the toilet.

Instead, the company says its new system is much more complex, using a series of switches that check and recheck measurements 160 times per second, for a total of 2,400 times over the 15-second measurement period. Calculation and recalculation. Seriously, I can’t overstate how somewhat of an admiration Samsung has spent trying to explain this feature or the graphics.

The end result is body composition measurements that Samsung says are 98% associated with a conventional DXA scan. That would be a pretty impressive feat, if really accurate. But they seem to support this claim not only with fictional stock shots of people in labs, but also notably an image of the Pennington Center for Biomedical Research, which focuses on areas like this.

As always, I’d be interested in doing some independent testing of this, perhaps getting a few volunteers in the Amsterdam area. This of course depends on global conditions allowing, but I’m more optimistic than usual about this.

Next, Samsung is expanding ECG access to more countries (this is mostly just a certification thing), and the full list of supported countries is now listed here:

Finally, on the fitness stuff, they’ve added team-based challenges to the wrist itself, which launched in June on the mobile app:

Finally, moving on to some quick non-fitness related things:

– There is an LTE version of the watch, eSIM- Watch4 uses a 5nm processor for the first time in the Galaxy Watch- The process is 20% faster, the watch has 50% more RAM with a GPU that is 10 times faster than Previous Samsung Watches (as usual, with the specifications of the watch, we usually have to rely on manufacturers for this) – Screen 450 x 450 pixels – There is 16 GB storage for music / apps / etc … – The claimed battery life is 40 hours, which means It’s a daily charge like an Apple Watch – 30 minutes of charging provides 10 hours of battery life (which is actually surprisingly slow by watch charging standards) – Spotify streaming can happen over LTE – New gesture controls, including simply shaking your wrist to dismiss Call – Offer much more color strap options than before

Finally, there is an all-new One UI Clock, which is designed to use only two buttons and the touch screen. However, Samsung has kept aspects of the bezel controls at the base of the Galaxy Watch, which are familiar to Samsung users. While the Galaxy Watch4 Classic has a full rotating bezel.

Again, it will be interesting to see how all of this works in real life once we’ve been practicing.

It is contained:

This is widely believed to be the last of the Hail Mary for Wear OS. Though, there is no better option than Samsung to try and stop this. But one also has to wonder why Google didn’t use Fitbit (which they got) to launch their first new Wear OS watch. Then again, Samsung might have simply said “Look, if you want us, we go first” – and that was the case.

Either way, I’m very interested to see what resolution the Watch4 looks like, and to see if it pulls off what Samsung claims. If so – that would be very important, not just for watches, but body impedance meters in general, which has often left many wanting better results (both figuratively and literally).

The rest of the watch looks similar to what we see now across the board from the watchmakers – more incremental updates than massive transformations. As the world of wearable devices continues to stabilize, there is less reason for massive philosophical or technological changes.

With that – thanks for reading!

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