I've always looked longingly at the smartwatch market, and specifically at Samsung. However, I prefer Google apps and have a Pixel phone. The time was right when the Galaxy watch 4 was announced, and that it would support Google's WearOS.

The rotating bezel was always a no-brainer. It's so intuitive, and seems to always just do what I want it to do. Answering calls? Just a twist away. Scrolling? It's got you covered. In a music app? It'll crank the volume. And it's so physically satisfying! Perfection.

And so I pulled the trigger, and bought the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. It's been fantastic.

The most important thing for me is battery life. I'm not really interested in sleep tracking, but I do want my watch to last the whole day without having to worry about anything. It definitely does so! It took a day or 2 to learn my habits, and then it took over from there. It'll now last me about a day + sleep tracking with normal usage, always connected to my phone via Bluetooth.

With traditional "dumb" watches, was extremely frustrating having to choose a watch because you wouldn't get all the information you want. I love having the day, month, and year in words, without finicky numbers and weird fonts. Hence, I absolutely love watch faces! My current go to is the Pixel Minimal Watch Face which gives me all the information I need to know. I can customize what shows up, change the date between long and short format, and choose 2 widgets to have up top (mine are weather and steps). It's great.

One twist of the watch and you get tiles (widgets) of which I have 4.

• Weather! This is not necessary since I also have an indicator on the watch face itself, but I like the interface of the app. For some reason when starting up the watch the location permission for weather is actually denied, so I had to manually go into the permissions and allow this. I have the weather refresh every hour so it's almost always been up to date.

• Contacts, which allow me to quickly call my brother, sister mom and dad. You can have 4 per screen (so one was perfect for me).

• Calendar, which serves not only as a quick glance, but also a shortcut by tapping into the app of the same name. This is particularly helpful, because the calendar app on the watch syncs with my Google calendar! I can have the events pop up on either device just as I want.

• A Samsung Health (green app) shortcut, which can start a running workout with a quick tap.

The presence of Google Assistant has absolutely made my life easier. I have a pixel phone and live in a Google smart home. It's been fantastic. In fact, it's been so convenient that I have the double top of the home button mapped to the Google Assistant.

The same can be said of the Google Home app, whose preview actually launched on this watch before Google's own Pixel watch! I do wish the Google home app was a bit more functional, at this time you can only turn on or off devices and adjust the brightness. It's totally better than nothing though, and being able to turn on or off devices using my watch just feels like something out of a science fiction movie.

I love how there's bidirectional finding on the watch and paired phone. Knowing me, I'm bound to misplace one or the other throughout my house. Luckily, I can use the device near me to quickly ring the other device, even if it's on vibrate.

Bedtime and theatre mode are both exceptional and do exactly what they say on the tin.

I was very surprised about how the Samsung apps actually talk to the Google apps on my phone. If I add a Google contact on my phone, it will sync with the Samsung contacts app on the watch. The Samsung phone app has the same call history as my Google phone app on my Pixel. And again, the convenience Samsung calendar speaks to the Google calendar, which for me eliminates need for a standalone app.

Also, Samsung will backup everything. Your watch faces, your reminders, your tiles, your watch settings, and basically anything you can think of. Wow! I always do a factory reset as part of testing any new device, and I was back up and running within minutes. Phenomenal.

Minor negative: Having a pixel phone, comes with a couple of trade-offs when using a Samsung watch.

1. I cannot use the Samsung health monitor app (orange one), meaning I cannot take blood pressure or do an ECG. Thankfully, I'm a relatively healthy person and have never had the need to do either outside of a medical setting. There's also a documented XDA workaround if you do need this.

2. I absolutely detest Samsung pay. Even after a factory reset, I wasn't able to get it to work. I know that there's no app for my pixel on the play store, so that could be part of the reason. I ended up remapping this to Google Pay using G Watch 4 Remap, which allows the remapping of the hardware buttons. Now, the old tap and hold of the back/context button is mapped to Google Pay.

3. Samsung's keyboard is awful. One of the first things I did was download gboard, which allows you to use a traditional keyboard (you can then tap or swipe) and it's remarkably accurate.

Overall: AMAZING! This marriage of Samsung and Google has made the watch a pleasure to use. Well done to both the companies.