Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 // In-Depth Review for Sports & Fitness By DesFit

So, I've reviewed quite a few Samsung wearables in the past, so I've tested the galaxy watch active. The galaxy watches active 2, the gear sport, as well as the original galaxy watch, and although all of them are great smartwatches, there are always some issues on the fitness and sports end of things that made him kind of hard to recommend so like with the gear sport. The GPS performance was not so good and then with nearly all of them. The heart rate performance was lackluster, but with the galaxy watch 3, it's not perfect by any means, but it is much better than any Samsung wearable I've tested before how's it going folks, I'm DES with Desmond. This is the new Samsung Galaxy watch, three, which is Samsung's latest and greatest smartwatch. So in this in-depth review, I'm going to go into how the galaxy watch 3 performs in the sports and fitness capacity.

So I tested for a lot of different types of activities. So I test it with running cycling, weight training as well swimming. Just to give you a good idea of this device is going to be right for you. So if you do find the information as a video useful, don't be shy about hitting that like button down below it's a small little thing that you can do that helps the channel a lot and I appreciate it. So the new galaxy watch 3 comes in two different sizes, a 45 millimeter version and a 41 millimeter version, and the one that I tested is the 45 millimeter version, and this is what it looks like on my 195 millimeter circumference wrist.

The display just like pretty much any Samsung device is going to be amazing to look at, and it's protected by corning gorilla, glass DX. The AMOLED display is super bright. It has tons of clarity and detail, and it's not bad outdoors, but it can be a little challenging to see in direct sunlight. The construction is going to be really solid, since it's going to be built out of stainless steel and then on the back of the device. You'll find the heart rate sensor and then these are going to be industry, standard, 22, millimeter straps, at least on the 45 millimeter version.

So you can swap these bands out for whatever you wish for battery life. I typically do about an hour-long GPS activity per day and with that sort of usage, I was getting about a day and a half out of it, and that was with the always on display being disabled. If I enabled the always on display, I was getting more around the 24-hour mark for battery life during GPS activities when they had the always on display being enabled it was using about 18 of the battery per hour and then, when I disabled, the always on display, it definitely squeaked out a little more. So it was using about 15 of the battery per hour, and this was using the high location accuracy setting for GPS activities. You can disable this setting to squeak out just a little more battery life, but for my testing, it's not that compelling of a difference.

So I would just recommend having this setting set on just so. You can get the best GPS accuracy, so you could probably do about a five and a half to six and a half hour, long GPS activity on a full charge which isn't amazing by any means and by the way that is with the 45 millimeter version. So if you have a 41 millimeter version, it's going to be less than a smartwatch. The galaxy watch 3 will give you one white notifications when you pair it to an iPhone, but when you use it with an android based phone you'll get a lot more features like with text messages and emails. You'll be able to reply using voice dictation, there's a lot of emojis to choose from there's a bunch of predefined responses.

You can actually use as well, and then you can even write on the screen or use an on-screen keyboard, and then you can view calendar events, there's weather information and there's also going to be Samsung. Pay but just note that Samsung pay isn't available if you pair the galaxy watch 3 with an iPhone there's also a Spotify app, which is pretty full-featured where you can see recently played tracks featured playlists, your music, and you can even browse and search for music as well. The playlists look really nice, and they show some album covers within the playlist, and then you'll also be able to download for offline listening. When you don't have connectivity to your phone or Wi-Fi for daily activity. Tracking the galaxy watch.3 will collect your steps. You can work out with it.

Obviously, there's going to be sleep, tracking, it'll track your heart rate and then with heart rate. This is where there's actually different settings for this, so you can set it to measure continuously every 10 minutes, or you can take a manual measurement and for the entire time I tested the galaxy watch 3. I had the heart rate settings set to measure continuously, but definitely hang out to see what Samsung calls continuously. When we talk about the workouts and then the galaxy watch, 3 also has stress tracking and then there's also blood oxygen, saturation or spo2 now for the blood oxygen saturation measurements. I found these results to be inconsistent, so in this clip which is all going to be one continuous, take it started off with a reading of 95 percent.

Then it gave me two readings at 92 percent, then two more readings at 97 percent and then another reading at 98 percent and then finally, another reading at 99 percent. So a variance of seven percent within just a couple of minutes of each other is quite a bit. So I would definitely take this whole measurement with a grain of salt. The galaxy watch three can also track your sleep and provide you with a sleep score. You can see the total duration in bed as well as your actual sleep time.

It will also break down the time in different sleep stages. However, in terms of the accuracy of that sleep tracking well, I had an amazing night's sleep that night, and it gave me a sleep score of 30, and I definitely was not awake for an hour. I slept like a rock, so Samsung recently released an update to enable the ECG functionality on the galaxy watch 3. However, I found one rather big caveat with this, so apparently it's only going to be available if you have a compatible, Samsung Galaxy phone running android in, and it's not available on any other android phone or an iPhone for that matter. So I think this locks out a large audience of those that may not have a Samsung phone, and that includes myself.

So I have a Google Pixel as well as an iPhone, and I'm not going to go, buy an additional Samsung phone just to get that little of functionality. I think at the very least, it should be available on all android phones, so now with all that out of the way, let's get into the meat of this review, and that's going to be how the galaxy watch 3 performs in sports and fitness capacity, the galaxy watch 3 comes with a pretty good selection of activity profiles. However, the activity profiles haven't changed all that much from the previous generations. There are a lot of the common profiles. You would come to expect like running cycling and swimming and then there's going to be profiles that are just individual exercises that are going to be part of a more complete workout routine.

So in all the following tests, like I was mentioning earlier, I had the heart rate setting to measure continuously, and then I had the high location accuracy enabled just so I could get the most accurate GPS results and to find the setting. This will be found in the settings of any outdoor activity profile. But what was nice is that this was actually set to on, by default, at least on the device that I had so, let's first start with running on this form I'll run. Well, you can see that the galaxy watch three came up about a tenth of a mile short, which may not seem like a ton, but it does throw off the average pace quite a bit. If we take a look at the mile splits, we can see that it was pretty off for the first mile, but it was a little closer on the others for the accuracy of the actual GPS tracks.

There's some corner cutting that we can see going on here and there which definitely could have attributed to that loss of distance. And then, when it comes to heart rate, this was actually pretty good for this test, and it followed along quite nicely. But going back to that heart rate setting I mentioned earlier about measuring continuously. If we zoom in, we can see that the galaxy watch 3 does not take heart rate samples every second or even what I would define as continuously it's kind of random, but it looks like it tries to take samples every 10 seconds or so, and then there's also going to be some new advanced running dynamics, data that can be viewed, but these are all rather vague. Giving me information like great good or improve those words.

Don't really tell me a lot, so I definitely like to see a lot more detail on that department. However, it will provide a vo2 max, and this was actually pretty close to what some other devices report for my estimated vo2 max and then for running indoors on the treadmill. I first ran outside a handful of times just so the watch can get an idea of my running dynamics to better estimate indoor running distances, but the galaxy watch 3 came up short, like quite short of the 3.1 miles that I actually ran, and this was actually the same thing I saw on all previous Samsung wearables that I've tested. So, unfortunately, that has not improved for cycling, let's first start with a road ride, so on this ride it was incredibly close to the other test devices for the total distance. There's good stuff there, but the calories again were a bit low and then, in terms of elevation under total ascent.

This isn't your total vertical scent like pretty much every other watch, tells you rather that's the amount of horizontal distance when you're actually climbing, because if we were to convert that half mile to feet well that doesn't line up even close to the other test devices. However, if we import that ride data into another program, that actually does calculate the total ascent. Well, that's pretty off as well. So I suppose there's some inconsistency with that consistency for indoor cycling, you can't pair the galaxy watch 3 with speed and cadence sensors natively, so the information that's collected in Samsung health is going to be pretty basic with just the duration, calories and then heart rate. However, for heart rate, it was pretty good.

There were two very minor blips right here and here, but overall I'd say that these are some pretty good results other than the fact that the sampling rate was again kind of infrequent for mountain biking. On this ride, the galaxy watch did a pretty good job in tracking the total distances was fairly close to the two other test devices. If we take a look at the GPS tracks from a high level view, it looks okay, but if we zoom in over here on the right-hand side of the map, we can see some areas where the galaxy watch 3 was cutting some corners quite a bit on some occasions and then again this was using the high location accuracy setting for heart rate, the first half of this ride was actually pretty decent, but then things started to get a bit funky. On the second half, you can see some fairly lengthy gaps where it lost heart rate. It did track more closely for a bit, and then it had a few spikes at the end.

Calories were low, just like the other examples and then for elevation gain again. That's the horizontal distance. When you're climbing, because there's no way, I climbed fifteen thousand feet on this ride, but if we analyze the elevation gain using the third party tool. Well, it came up quite short for pool swimming. The galaxy watches.

Three can automatically track laps where you'll set your pool length in the settings menu where you can choose between some common pool sizes, but you can also set a custom pool length in meters or yards. It did a good job in automatically tracking laps and the total distance was accurate compared to another device. It will also give you a breakdown of your laps and also has automatic stroke detection that work. Just fine you'll also get additional information like the total strokes, your total lengths, average and best swell score, as well as speed and pace metrics. The galaxy watch 3 will also attempt to collect your heart rate in the water.

Now the average and max heart rate for the entire session isn't that far off from a chest, heart rate strap, but you can probably already see some pretty big differences between the charts. So what we can see is that when we take a close look at the results is that, at the beginning of the session there were some fairly wild variations going on where it was tracking high. In all fairness, at some point, there were some similarities between them, but just like all the other activities, it's not really tracking with much frequency. It's only taking heart rate samples periodically, and I'm not looking for perfection when it comes to risk-based heart rate for swimming there's a lot of variables involved. There's a lot of arm movement, there's the possibility of water getting in between the sensor and your skin, but I've definitely seen more accurate results for swimming risk-based heart rate and then on that subject, another activity that's going to be really challenging for a risk-based heart rate sensor is going to be weight training.

So let's take a look at some of that data on this session here the galaxy watch 3 started out tracking high, but then you can see that it had some troubles throughout the first 17 minutes or so after that it did start to get close to the other heart rate. Monitors I was using, but you can see that it dipped on quite a few occasions around the 22 to 28 minute mark and then at the end, when I did some higher intensity intervals, it actually did an okay job except for tracking low on the third set, and then it didn't track the decrease in heart rate, as I cooled down, and in all fairness, that's pretty much par for the course when it comes to risk-based heart rate, for weight, training and high-intensity animal training. There's going to be some that are gonna, be better than others, but I'm not really docking many points for that, and then I also wanted to cover some weight training related activity profiles that Samsung uses. So these are going to be individual profiles like arm curls, there's bench, press arm, extensions, dead lifts and then plenty of others that are designed to automatically track your reps. When you go to start one of these routines, it'll prompt you to get into a starting position, and then it'll give you a cue to start when it detects you're in the correct position.

It'll then start to count your reps, and it gives you an audible cue that reps are counting as well as when you've completed that set, and it does a good job in tracking reps. I tried lots of the different workout profiles and all of them worked for just fine and then, while the gym. I also tested this on the elliptical, where it gives some basic workout information when you're done so in regard to the heart rate accuracy, it was actually in line, but if we take a look at the heart rate data on its own, we can see that sporadic sampling and then to wrap things up. Let's also talk about the automatic workout detection, which is designed to automatically detect when you're running or walking cycling on the elliptical rowing machine or something what Samsung calls a dynamic workout. All of these actually work really well.

It takes about 10 minutes of doing an activity before this little animation pops up in your screen and then shows you that you started working out the time that it starts and stops. Recording is incredibly close to the other test devices that I manually started and stopped like on this bike ride. It was within just 12 seconds of the time that was recorded on the other devices and that's pretty darn good, and although the duration was good, the heart rate that was recorded during the activity was not so good, and it wasn't really recorded with any meaningful frequency, and there were some pretty massive gaps between the points where it was actually capturing my heart rate, which resulted in a calorie calculation that was pretty far off from reality for swimming again. It did a perfect job. Knowing when I started in stop swing being only four seconds off from the other test devices, you can probably already tell that it didn't really track the heart rate, and it doesn't give you much in terms of detail while using the automatic detection, but it does give you what it thinks was your average and maximum heart rate, which was just a wee bit off the automatic workout detection is neat and all it actually does work well for the tracking, the duration of your workout, but the heart rate is uh, not so good, oh- and also I alluded to this earlier, but you're not gonna, be able to natively pair any external sensors to the galaxy watch, three like an external heart rate sensor or speed and cadence sensors, which again is a huge disappointment.

However, there actually is a third party watch face, slash app called sporty go, which does allow you to actually pair external heart rate sensor, but it's only going to work with that watch face or app. So what do I think about the new Samsung Galaxy watch? 3? Well, the good news is it performed better than any previous Samsung watch that I've ever tested. However, there's plenty of room for improvement, and that's mainly surrounding the GPS and heart rate accuracy, and how often it actually tracks those two metrics, the same thing rate for both of those isn't really comparable to any other fitness device. That's on the market today and based on the fact that you're only going to be able to get about five and a half to six and a half hours of GPS battery life, I'm guessing that they do that to preserve the battery life. So it's great to see that things have improved with the galaxy watch.

Three, I think again, it's probably a device that, if you're looking for a smartwatch first in a fitness watch. Second, it's probably going to be a good option. But if you're looking for a perfect capable fitness device, you may want to look elsewhere. Anyhow, if you found the information, this video useful make sure to hit that like button down below and also subscribe, the channel for plenty more sports tech videos that are coming soon, like the Fitbit sense that I'm currently testing right now in the meantime, have fun out there, and we will see you in the next video you.

Source : DesFit