May 11, 2023 -

For the last three weeks, I have been testing out a Galaxy Watch 5 40mm LTE, while wearing my Garmin Fenix 6 Pro on my ankle. I'm writing this review as a way to help myself figure out what I want to do with it going forward.

I was able to get a great deal on a used, but mint GW5, and I was always curious about it. The ECG, the Body Composition, it was all intriguing to me, however I never had a Samsung phone until recently so it wasn't something I could use. I also liked the idea of having an LTE device so I could go running without my phone but still be reached in case of emergency. I currently have a Fenix 6 Pro, which I love. I have used a Vivomove Style that I have since sold, and a Venu SQ which I gave to a friend. I'm not picky when it comes to AMOLED vs. MIP. I like both.

There are plenty of reviews out there that focus on the raw data. I don't really have the time to figure out how to export the graphs into the charts that DC Rainmaker uses, so I'm going to focus more on real-life usage and general thoughts. The Galaxy Watch 6 supposedly doesn't have any different sensors, just a faster processor, so most of this should still apply to the GW6.

Apologies for all the pictures, I'm just a visual person so they help people like me.

Physical Comparison

• Both feel quite sturdy and durable. The GW5's buttons are a bit clickier, for whatever that is worth.

• The standard GW5 band does not give me the 'Garmin rash'. Its a very soft silicone and is comfortable.

• Despite looking similar in height, the GW5 sits a lot lower on the wrist.

• The GW5 has a sapphire screen and it can take some hits. I've not been treating it nicely and it is still pristine.

• With the bands I have, the Fenix weighs 84g and the GW5 weighs 42g.

The two are obviously very different styles. I appreciate both a lot. I've been looking for something that is more dressy and less rugged than the Fenix, and while this is definitely more minimal, smartwatches aren't classy. I don't care how hard Apple and Samsung try to market it as if they are lol, but that is just me. I had a Vivomove Style in the past and while I liked it, it had other issues like a difficult to use touchscreen. I'm probably just going to have to use a Seiko or Holzkern to get what I'm looking for.

Battery Life

I get about 40 hours of battery life with the settings I used. I did play with the watch a lot, so I think you could eke out a bit more if you were careful. If you charged it every day, you could skip or forget a day and it would be fine.

This was an interesting twist to me. Originally one of the (many) reasons I went with Garmin as opposed to a WearOS watch was specifically for the battery life. And its legit a big benefit. I love that I almost never have to think about charging my Fenix. If it tells me its at 10% battery? That's fine, I'll charge it tomorrow. You can do it whenever you like, at your convenience. My Fenix has spent only 1 hour charging in the three weeks I've had the GW5.

With the GW5, that is not the case. You do have to establish a routine of when to charge it. You don't have to with the Fenix. That being said, I realized later on that I can wirelessly charge the watch with my phone, which actually alleviated a lot of that battery anxiety. If I'm at work and notice its starting to get low, I can just set it on my phone and get enough juice to last me the rest of the day. The battery charges quite quickly when its low.

The settings I used:

• Turned on continuous heart rate

• Turned off blood ox during sleep

• Turned off Always on Display

• Turned off Raise to Wake (I'll explain in the next section)

• Disabled LTE and WiFi, only turned them on as needed

Everyday Use

• Beautiful, smooth, responsive, bright 60hz screen.

• When performing tasks or switching apps, it is a bit slow as it changes context. Once it does, its fast again. This sort of thing doesn't bother me at all, but apparently it drives other people insane?

• Touch screen tended to behave pretty well. It was responsive and accurate, but it absolutely freaks out in water. You have to disable the touchscreen if there is going to be any sort of water.

• I turned off the AoD and raise to wake because I'm used to my Fenix's MIP screen which doesn't emit light. It got quite annoying to me that the GW5 would light up on its own.

• At least when I had my Venu SQ, it's raise to wake was a bit better behaved and it didn't bother me as much.

• Samsung Pay seems to work just fine.

• Your watch needs a pin every time you take it off to get into it. This is annoying to me, because I switch wrists when I sleep and wake up, if I'm washing dishes, etc. Every time the watch leaves your wrist, you have to enter a pin. I get why it does it, but its more annoying than I'd thought it'd be. I much would prefer it if it just asked for a pin if you're going to access something sensitive rather than if you so much as just touch it.

• Because the watch doesn't have Body Battery, there's much less of a need to keep it on 24/7. I haven't broken this habit yet after wearing Garmins for almost 3 years, but its a mindset change that is certainly there.

Smartwatch Features

• Surprisingly, I tend to get notifications faster and more reliably on Garmin, probably because Garmin's setup is a lot more basic.

• It offers a lot of duplicate functionality of your phone, like calculators, calendar, note taking, voice assistant access, and so on. This way, you can leave your phone behind but still do the things you need to do in a pinch.

• I'm not big on voice assistants personally. Bixby has its uses for automation, but the routines I have setup are ... well ... automated. I don't need my watch to trigger things in the first place.

• Play store is mainly just music and podcast players, health apps, and calendars / reminders.

• SmartThings integration is nice, but not as deep as I thought unless I'm missing something. While I'm sure someday it might be useful to be able to control my thermostat from my watch, it's much more inconvenient to use the watch as opposed to using my phone or just standing up and adjusting the thing manually.

• WhatsApp's watch app is not reliable yet.

• Being able to see a full conversation history on the watch is pretty nice, so is being able to start a conversation if its with an app installed on the watch, like with WhatsApp or Messages.

Honestly, I was struggling to find a use-case for what thigns I could do with a WearOS watch that I couldn't on a Garmin. I posed the question to the Samsung and WearOS subreddits, and outside of some extremely niche things, the only things people used their watches for were health tracking, payments, and responding to calls and notifications.

I found it kind of funny that people gave me strange reactions when I asked what they do with their watches with the expectation of something other than health tracking and notifications. I have fond memories as a kid watching spy movies with watches that could do so many cool things. I've always liked watches for that reason. To see people be so indifferent and dismissive about it was strange...but to be fair, I couldn't really come up with anything either.

Doing more advanced tasks on the watch is just not a recipe for good UX. The screen is beautiful, but when you can cover 90% of it with your finger, it's not exactly something I want to spend a lot of time tapping.

The common comparison has always been "____ is a smartwatch with fitness features, Garmin is a fitness watch with smartwatch features" ... but is that really true? Honestly Garmin has most of the smartwatch features too. The ones it doesn't have don't add a whole lot of value, at least for me.

Communication

• Answering a call on your watch is pretty awkward imo. My friend pointed out that there are times where it makes sense, like when your hands are full. I just have coworkers who have it as their main way of communicating and it gets on my nerves.

• The speakers sound fine, they get surprisingly loud.

• Being able to type out a custom reply to a message though? Way better than I would have imagined.

I have a unique situation at work where the signal is extremely weak, and I can't connect my personal device to the workplace wifi. If I so much as pick up my phone, my hand is enough to block signal and it could be out for as much as several minutes. This is obviously quite frustrating when you're trying to carry on a conversation. When I got my Fenix and I was able to view and dismiss notifications without touching my phone, that was a game-changer. The GW5 being able to type custom replies to those notifications on the watch? This genuinely may be the biggest reason for me to use it. I can keep my phone in its spot where it has signal and still be able to communicate when I need to.

ECG

Seems good enough. I turned on irregular heart beat notifications, never got an event. I don't have much else to say about it since I don't have AFib. Like with most watches, unless you need it, it's mainly a gimmick.

Body Composition

I've heard so many bad things about the Body Composition sensor on the Galaxy Watch series, and the biggest thing I've learned is that people are terrible at following directions.

The sensor works by sending electrical current with varying frequencies and intensities throughout your body to measure the resistance it provides. Using these measurements and a lot of analysis, it is able to estimate the proportion of muscle, fat, and water in your body.

As more serious fitness people know, your body changes throughout the day. You retain more water, you might swell a bit. You eat food, use the bathroom, maybe have a lot of salt in your meal. All of these things will affect the electrical resistance your body provides, which in turn will affect the Body Composition reading.

The body composition sensor tells you to measure at the same time every day, and recommends to measure at a when you first wake up and after you use the bathroom, and before you eat or drink. So that's what I did.

My readings were remarkably consistent and believable, getting with 0.5% of the same reading each day. I've not had a Dexa scan so I don't know how they compare to the results of a scan, but it's not like that matters that much anyway. It's the trends that matter, right? So if you want to reduce body fat, you want to see that body fat number go down.

I've not had the watch long enough to see definitive trends, but I have been getting back to exercising regularly and my numbers from the Body Composition sensor are heading in the direction I both expect and hope for.

Sleep

It had very different results from Garmin. I have no real good way to tell which is better. Garmin's Body Battery tends to give me better estimation of how I'm going to feel regardless, so sleep measurements don't really mean much in my experience. The GW5's sleep features seem to be more intended to make sure you actually get sleep, rather than how good your sleep is. However, this might change as the GW6 sleep features roll out.

My Fenix gave me a sleep score of 76 for this night.

Stress

The stress algorithm behaves quite differently from Garmin's. I'm not sure what it's measuring, because it shows entirely different peaks from my Fenix. I never really found it that useful to me. It never seemed to match what I would have expected it to read.

Other Health Features

• Step tracking seems pretty good.

• The GW5 gives me much higher calorie consumption estimates compared to my Fenix (which I always suspected was on the low side)

• Samsung Health has a built-in meal tracker which is pretty decent for being a free service. I think I still might recommend LoseIt for people who want to really be careful of what they eat, but if you want to get started in meal tracking, it works well. You can also enter in calories consumed from the watch itself if you want to just count calories.

• I didn't bother with trying to "close my rings". It's not a motivator for me.

Running Features

Ok so let me get this out of the way--I'm not a serious runner. Honestly, a Fenix is overkill for me. I am just motivated by data, so having these tools makes me want to use them, and that's a good thing when it comes to improving your health.

At a surface level, all of the important stuff is there on the GW5. It measures your heart rate, heart rate zones, GPS position, pace, speed, elevation gain and drop, cadence, even running dynamics.

However, it's not that simple. The GW5's Achilles heel is inconsistency. There are times when the GPS and heart rate sensors are completely spot on with my Fenix 6 and HRM Pro. When running, I never encountered a time where the GW5's heart rate sensor was that far off my Fenix 6, or the HRM Pro. The GPS though? In one of my workouts, it took about 5 minutes to get my position, and its elevation was wildly off. The elevation is shown in one of the pictures I have below in comparison to the Fenix 6. During a walk earlier on, the GPS was actually better on the GW5 than the Fenix 6. The route I take is hilly with some occasional tree cover, but no tall buildings or mountains.

I am not an expert in running dynamics, so I can't really determine how accurate the GW5's are compared to the Fenix 6 + HRM Pro. I do however appreciate that the GW5 actually tells me if what I'm doing is good or bad, and does give recommendations on what to do about it. Garmin's running dynamics always looked cool but were kinda overwhelming and I wasn't sure what to do with them.

Galaxy Watch 5 Workout Overview GW5 Running Dynamics Fenix 6 Running Dynamics GW5 vs. Fenix 6 Heart rate and elevation

Strength Training

This has never been a strong suit for Garmin, but the GW5 doesn't even support a free weights exercise at all. I had to choose a generic workout profile to record during the exercise, so there was no rep / set detection, no movement detection, or anything of the sort. Not that there was much point, the heart rate sensor was pretty off in comparison to what was actually going on, according to my HRM Pro. The GW5 only matched one peak heart rate of 176 at the 25:48 mark, the rest are entirely too low or are late. The GW5 has a weight machine exercise profile, which the Fenix 6 does not, but I have not tried that one yet.

Conclusion

This is complicated. Honestly, the Fenix is the better watch by a landslide, for me. I want to stress that, it is better for my use-case. I am motivated by data, and having reliable data is a huge benefit to me. The GW5's inconsistency makes it hard to recommend for anything beyond just remembering that "I actually worked out last week". For a lot of people, this is actually good enough. They want to know that they did something, rather than how well they did at it. They aren't going to care about the numbers and data, it just makes them feel good about themselves..and if that's what gets them motivated, then that's wonderful. Its a great option to fit them. Don't drag them down this data-driven life we lead if it's not going to benefit them lol. As an aside, the Fenix did surprisingly well reading from my ankle over the last three weeks. Only downside is that it doesn't count my steps that well, otherwise its been working great.

However, just because the Fenix is the better watch for me, does NOT mean that I don't like the GW5 a lot. I do. It's cool, the screen is pretty, it feels nice to use. Being able to text at work and not lose signal is an incredibly powerful motivator for me to keep using it. I find myself wanting it to be great. This thing has the potential to be an amazing device, it just needs, well, many years of refinement to get there. Samsung pretty much started from scratch with the Galaxy Watch 4 in terms of the platform, and it does show. This feels like a second-generation product.

I've realized that Garmin's Body Battery is a 'killer app' for me. I use it way more than I realized, and its why I keep the watch on 24/7. I honestly don't feel the need to keep the GW5 on 24/7. Sleep tracking for me doesn't mean much, and without recharging a Body Battery, it feels like its just a pretty graph that doesn't tell me anything meaningful or correlate with how well I feel. I have good sleep habits as it is, so I don't need something to track me to remind me to get sleep.

The smartwatch features are providing solutions to problems I don't have. This is the case with all WearOS / Apple Watches to me. I don't care for voice assistants, I don't want to talk to my wrist, and any quick access to things like Smart Home stuff, I've already automated away so that I don't need to interact with it in the first place. Otherwise, my phone is always within reach.

I think that's the biggest thing it would enable you to do, is to be less attached to your phone. It's not typically a problem I have, I don't spend a lot of time on it in the first place, but its something to consider.

But if I had to say my biggest takeaway out of all of this, would be that if a Garmin watch had an on-screen keyboard to reply to notifications, that would be the perfect device and I would never have a need for any other watch.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the GW5 yet. I might try wearing it exclusively for a while to give it the best chance to live with it and just accept that I'll lose my HRV Status on my Fenix for a while. I'm still undecided.

And that's the thing. I'm undecided because I really want it to work. There's something about it that I like a lot. I don't know if its the UX or just that it's a new thing to me. But I like it.