Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic review: The best WearOS smartwatch you can get

As someone who’s only ever used Android smartphones for the most part of their life, I’ve actually never used an accompanying Android smartwatch. Why? Well to put it simply, it’s always had a reputation for not being very good.

Google’s WearOS was nowhere near the Apple WatchOS in terms of the overall user experience, mostly due to the lackluster hardware manufacturers often paired it with. Over the years, Qualcomm’s lackluster smartwatch processors had meant that many smartwatches were being bottlenecked by the silicon. Meanwhile, the only real contender to the Apple Watch over the years had been Samsung’s lineup of Galaxy Watch series, but that didn’t even run Android. Instead, it came with Tizen out of the box, and as such suffered from a lack of third party apps.

That ends now though, as thanks to a partnership between Google and Samsung, we now have the new Galaxy Watch 4 series, with the Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic sporting a revamped WearOS 3, with Samsung’s own One UI Watch skin over it. Samsung have very kindly sent over a Galaxy Watch 4 Classic for us to review, but before we get to my time using it, let’s first talk about how it looks.

It’s big, sleek and familiar

Right off the bat, you can see why it has the ‘Classic’ moniker in its name, as it’s a fairly familiar design. You get a stainless steel body with a rotating bezel and two buttons on the side, a 20mm wide silicone band and a 1.4-inch display on our 46mm model. It also has a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass DX over the display for protection.

The first impression I had even before strapping it on my wrist is that it’s one big, hefty boy. Ours is the heaviest model in the Galaxy Watch 4 lineup and I can certainly feel it. The way the silicone strap attaches onto the watch’s lugs makes it a little uncomfortable during the first couple of hours of wear though. Because of the way the lugs are angled, it makes the strap bend at an awkward angle to wrap around my wrist.

As for the actual display itself, it’s nice and bright thanks to the 46mm, 450 x 450p AMOLED panel used, with the vivid colours always visible to me even in bright sunlight. I had it set to use a colour-changing watch face, and the colour really pops. You can also turn on Always-on Display mode, making it truly feel like a “real” watch, though that did cause battery life to suffer a bit.

One minor nitpick I will point out though is that the two loops on the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic’s strap are pretty finnicky. For the most part, I’d have one loop close to the buckle, and another further down. This is to prevent the longer end of the strap from flopping about. However, I find that the loops will often slide up and let go of the strap, letting it hang loose. It’s a small inconvenience sure, but it’s still something I thought was worth pointing out. Besides, you can also opt to swap out the strap for any standard 20mm strap if you’d like.

Nevertheless, it’s a pretty beautiful watch to my eyes. Its stainless steel build oozes the kind of sleek that the normal Galaxy Watch 4 doesn’t, and with the right watch face on the display you could even pass it off as a “real” watch. The rotating bezel is easy to use while the two buttons on the right of the watch head are fairly tactile too. Once I got used to the heft of it, the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic felt much more natural on the wrist.

WearOS is surprisingly fun to use

Perhaps it’s because I’ve never used a proper smartwatch before this, but I had a near childlike curiosity when using the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. Most of my previous experience was with trackers that had simple interfaces and not many functions. The Galaxy Watch 4 Classic though offered a lot more functionality and features which I feel makes it a great device for anyone’s first Android smartwatch.

Upon booting it up and fiddling it up for a bit, the control scheme became fairly obvious to use; rotate the bezel left or right to move about the menus, a home button for going straight to the main page and a back button below it for, well, going back. There are gesture controls too if you prefer using that. When I actually went about exploring the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic, it seems to me that there’s been quite a lot of thought put into how to navigate, which in retrospect is kinda obvious as Samsung already has years of experience with their earlier Galaxy Watch devices.

Samsung has put a brand new processor under the hood of the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic here—the Samsung Exynos W920. It’s the first 5nm processor meant for wearables, and the supposedly more capable silicon, along with extra RAM, does seem to work great here. I didn’t notice any laggy moments or choppy animations, even during multitasking like when I reply messages on WhatsApp while it controls my Spotify. There’s also a fairly solid speaker on it to chime for notifications and calls, and it will let you play your Spotify music too though it certainly isn’t the loudest. And together with the onboard mic you’ll also be able to take calls on the go.

While technically speaking this is WearOS with Samsung’s One UI Watch skin over it, it has a very Google feel to it. You get the Google Play Store to download apps like Spotify, Telegram and Outlook, there’s Google Maps for navigation, Gboard, Google Keep and Calendar for productivity and an assortment of tools like a flashlight, calculator and…. Bixby. Unfortunately, no Google Assistant here, but it wasn’t really that much of a dealbreaker for me. The Galaxy Wearable app you’ll need to download on your phone was also fairly simple to use.

Unfortunately though, battery life was a little here and there for me. Samsung rates the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic for about 40 hours, which should entail just under two days of use. While for the most part I managed to get through two working days with it from a full charge, there were days where I was down to roughly 20% by the time I wanted to hit the bed even though there wasn’t any major changes in usage behaviour. It should also be pointed out that charging felt like forever with the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic, taking about two hours to get a full charge on it.

Perhaps there will be some more optimisation of battery usage in future OTA updates, but right now it’s a little underwhelming. The magnetic wireless charger was also a little cumbersome to use. You pretty much have to really get it centered, or else you won’t actually be charging the thing as the magnets don’t always line up very well.

Now I’m not the fittest nor am I the healthiest of people, so I will admit that a lot of the health features were a little lost on me. Nevertheless, I did use some of the health features a fair bit and they worked fairly well. The body composition scanner managed to tell me that I’m overweight with a high body fat percentage with reasonable accuracy so there’s that. There’s also the usual crowd of health tracking apps, like activity and sleep tracking, heart rate monitoring, stress measurement and also a snore detector. Another cool feature is fall detection which can contact someone if it detects a fall.

Other than that, you’re getting a fairly solid set of functions and features focused on health. Swimmers will appreciate the water lock mode and the 5ATM rating, while the automated workout detection will get your metrics on your performance during your workout sessions. It comes with just 13 trackable activities, but the Samsung Health app will allow for over 80 to pick from to suit your tastes in gym.

It should be pointed out though that you might not be getting your full money’s worth here depending on the device you’re using and region you’re in. Samsung Pay is out of the question of course, as that’s only available on Samsung devices; Google Pay will apparently come to it, but in the whole of Southeast Asia you’ll only find it in Singaproe. Then there’s also the ECG and blood pressure monitors which are currently unavailable in Malaysia—not that you’ll be able to use it anyway if you aren’t using a Samsung device.

There’s nothing quite like the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic for Android fans

Let me rewind back to the start of this article real quick. The WearOS 3 that’s powering the Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic is a result of collaboration between Google and Samsung. This gives it a distinct advantage over its rivals out there, as every other Android smartwatch out there is still on WearOS 2.

There will be a few smartwatches on the market now that would be getting updated to WearOS 3 though. Of those, the Mobvoi Ticwatch E3 and Ticwatch Pro 3 stand out as the closest rivals to Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 lineup. They both use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 4100 system-on-chip, which are the latest wearable processors from them. While they both come with WearOS 2 out of the box for now, they are set to get upgraded to WearOS 3 by mid-2022.

The two Mobvoi Ticwatch wearables are also priced fairly competitively with the Galaxy Watch 4 lineup. The Galaxy Watch 4 starts at RM899 for the 40mm model, with the larger 44mm one priced at RM999. Meanwwhile the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic starts at RM1,299 for the 42mm model and RM1,399 for the 46mm version. As for the Mobvoi Ticwatch E3, it goes for RM830 on their official Shopee store, with the more premium Ticwatch Pro 3 going for RM1,320.

However, if you’re in the market for hands down the best Android has to offer in terms of a smartwatch, you really can’t go wrong with the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. Personally I’d recommend the larger version of either the Watch 4 or Watch 4 Classic, as while they come with similar internals for the most part, there’s one crucial difference between the bigger and smaller watches. The larger variants have a 361mAh battery, while the smaller ones only have a 247mAh battery, and as I had alluded to earlier battery life is a bit of a concern.

Overall though, Samsung have hit it out of the park here with the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. With the new WearOS proving to be a solid foundation to work on, the future is bright not just for Samsung’s wearables, but Android smartwatches as a whole.