Samsung Watch Active 2 Long Term Review! By GadgetByte

If, you guys have been keeping a keen eye on our videos for the past six months, or so you might have noticed me wearing a smartwatch, and this right here is the Samsung Galaxy watch active too well. Having used it for almost half a year is as good a time as any to make a long-term review. Isn't it practically contributing to my good health, the galaxy water, active 2 has not managed to get off my wrist for this long. This is also my first smartwatch. By the way I went for the 44?mm version, since it offers a slightly bigger battery on top of a larger display, but the reason I opted for the galaxy watch active 2 above others is well. There are a couple of reasons, first being the fact that I use a Samsung smartphone and that really helps with the Samsung ecosystem and all next.

It also looks way better than the honor magic watch 2, which is a little too sporty to my liking. The watch active 2, on the other hand, is really light and has a comfortable synthetic rubber, strap. Besides ease of usage, the strap is durable too, and even though customization is limited in a market like Nepal. I am quite happy with this regular aqua black variant that I have with me. Having said that, because it follows the universal 20?mm watchband standard, you can always customize the looks by slapping in a new pair of bands, if you feel like it, but the one that you get inside the box itself is of excellent quality and will last you just fine.

It sits by you comfortably, even with sweats and all, and I am yet to experience any kind of skin irritation from wearing this watch. Getting to the back of the watch, you can see the heart rate monitor while the right frame houses a back and a home button. You also get narrow bezels to pack in a larger display in a smaller form factor anyway. The most important upgrade of them all here has to be the gorilla glass, DX, plus certification for the display. If you recall, the original galaxy watch active had the gorilla glass 3 protection, which was not very durable here, the DX plus from corning has scratch resistance and anti-reflective properties.

As a result, the watch active 2 has managed to overcome some nasty collisions without any significant scratch whatsoever living in a city like Kathmandu. That is full of dust. I was worried if the surroundings would be too harsh on the watch. However, the gorilla glass DX plus has firmly proven its worth. Keeping the durability aside, its circular 1.4 inches AMOLED display is equally amazing. The 360 by 360 pixel density, has remained the same from the original watch.

Active though the panel itself is still just as vibrant. Brightness has been of no concern as the watch active 2 gets plenty bright, even when I'm outdoors, it is sufficiently sharp to the eyes and has an excellent contrast ratio too in a typical AMOLED fashion, the blacks are deep, the whites are bright, and the viewing angles is just great. It also retains the always on display feature if you're into that, but in my case I turned it off because it takes a significant toll on the battery and raising the wrist to wake. The screen just works, fine navigating around the screen is easy, and the touch response is fluid as well. The thin bezels around the edge of the screen are actually touch sensitive and mimic.

The physical rotating bezel found in Samsung's own gear, s3 and other smartwatches scrolling through the menu via the touch bezel gives you with a subtle haptic feedback every time, which is a really nice touch. Apart from using the dial you can also swipe or scroll through the display to navigate through the watch performance on the galaxy watch, active 2 has been satisfactory to say at the least and running the whole show here is once again Samsung's proprietary ti zen variable OS 4.0. The user interface feels very well-designed snappy, and I noticeably felt it got better with a few updates. Also, there are plenty of Samsung apps on the galaxy store, which may be enough to sum, but still google square OS and apple's watch OS are streets ahead when it comes to app choices, and one more unfortunate thing is that Spotify app does not work here in Nepal, which is kind of a bummer for me. Thus, I had to manually add songs into the onboard 4gb of internal storage.

In case I wanted to listen to music through my Bluetooth headphones. Whenever I went on a walk or gym, as I don't have to carry my phone, I really hope that Samsung brings an update really soon and enables Spotify here in Nepal, and one more feature I regularly use on my active2 is whenever I'm driving I receive calls directly from the watch itself, and the call quality is not that bad. Similarly, notifications work fine and apps, like Gmail messenger, get constantly synced, and you can also reply to messages or perform different actions to the reception notification. Also, the haptic feedback on receiving any notification is strong too, so you will hardly miss out any on them in terms of watch faces. There are a lot of options to choose from via the galaxy store, yet I am happy with this default, one which shows all the details.

I generally look up for like time date, battery life, weather steps, taken, calories, burned, etc. Earlier I talked about the back and the home button. While double tapping the home button will call up Samsung's digital assistant Bixby. Disappointingly, it is not quite responsive, as I'd like and is equally slow too. When it comes to fitness tracking, the galaxy watch.

Active 2 has a massive arsenal of them. You can track over 40 workouts and see each of their detailed breakdown inside the Samsung health app or the watch itself. But personally I like the running coach that gives an audio and visual cues while I am doing workouts from light jogging or endurance running. Similarly, I have set up a daily target of 6500 steps and the watch consistently keeps on pushing me to reach my daily target say I am already home from the office and have only walked through 80 of the aim. I am motivated towards achieving the full 6 500 steps.

Also, I am someone who's. Basically glued to the desk, while I'm at office and time and again the galaxy watch, active 2 would prompt a notification saying how about to work, and then I would make some time for a quick walk. These are such little things but end up making a huge impact on the overall user experience. It also has an inbuilt GPS and using this you can go on a hike or something similar without having to go through the hassle of carrying a phone. The watch can also track your sleep and I found it to be quite accurate.

Moreover, it is also 5 ATM water resistant. What this means is that you can take the watch active 2 up to 50 meters, deep in water, for up to 10 minutes, there's also, this cool water lock mode, which prevents any touch input when you're enjoying a swim. When you're done, you can simply press and hold the home key to turn it off, and the watch will then play a sound, then eject water through vibration. Likewise, it can also track menstruation cycle, while this feature was not available early on Samsung. Finally, provided a menstrual cycle tracking feature in its health app a while ago here, the galaxy watch active 2 also comes with a dedicated ECG sensor, which can record electrical activities of your heart and then check for different heart conditions.

Using this you'll be able to get a better reading of blood pressure compared to optical sensors found in common smartwatches in the market. However, the disappointing thing here is that this feature is yet to roll out in the majority of countries. Samsung has finally pushed an update to its South Korean customers. Last month, after receiving clearance from the company's ministry of health and drug safety for users elsewhere, Samsung says that this feature will be available in the third quarter of 2020, so fingers crossed. Finally, let's talk about battery life.

The 44 mm version that I have with me comes with a bigger 340 William hour cell and during my usage it lasted me somewhere between 3 and 3.5 days with the power saving feature turned on. That number would easily jump to a week. My usage consisted of light workouts, jogs now and then frequently working through calls notifications and so on. With all that, I was quite satisfied with the battery endurance for charging. You get a wireless charging dock inside the box and because smartwatches are a long term.

Investment Samsung has been clever enough to implement a rather slow charging speed as to preserve the battery health for years to come with this, the comparatively tiny 340 William hour battery takes about two hours to fully charge time to wrap it all up and, to be honest, the Samsung Galaxy watch, active 2, has been my closest companion and has been inspiring me to work out and stay fit during this course of 6 months, especially during the lockdown period. So if you want to improve your daily routine and stay fit, I strongly recommend you to get one of these fitness trackers and no, I'm not asking you to get the galaxy watch active to, particularly as there are plenty of great smartwatches. But if you are a Samsung user, the galaxy watch. Active 2 is definitely something you should check out and if you are in an Apple ecosystem, getting the Apple Watch is a no-brainer. Also.

I have just received the review sample of the galaxy watch active 3, so that is another interesting option too, but if the money is tight- and all you want is a good enough- fitness tracker- there are a bunch of other options from companies like Xiaomi, realm and honor. So that was my long-term experiences with the galaxy watch active 2. Would you like it to be your next fitness tracker? Do let us know in the comments below till then I'm ratio Asiatic, and thank you so much for watching.

Source : GadgetByte