Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 review: slightly refined, but falls short on battery life promises

The Galaxy Watch 7 inherits the band-latch mechanism from the previous model. You have a button that you press to release the strap and then reattach it again. It's simple enough, but if you've trimmed your nails a bit more you might have trouble pressing that button. Good news is that you can still use standard 20mm straps with spring bars.

The Watch 7 comes with a selection of new, colorful Ripple bands. We like the attention to detail and loved the provided sporty strap. The green color was nice and not boring with the stitching on the side, plus it seems extra durable.

Galaxy Watches have been rocking Wear OS for a while now. Samsung and Google came together, mixed up Tizen with Android, and came out with a smartwatch platform that took the best of both worlds. But you know, Samsung must be Samsung, so the Wear OS on Galaxy Watches has an extra skin on top, called One UI Watch.

So, the software here is One UI 6 Watch on top of Wear OS 5. It comes with new Galaxy AI features for the Watch 7 — it will analyze sensor data and deliver personalized health information, workout routine suggestions, and a holistic look at your wellbeing.

The big change here is called “dual-band GPS”. Hooray for that! This is great especially for athletes that work out in big cities, where GPS pick-up might be poor. Dual-band ensures much better accuracy.

I have used the Galaxy Watch 7 for running and cycling, and found GPS accuracy to be quite good, but not perfect. Occasionally, the track would stray off for no apparent reason, so there is still room for improvement.

I am also not seeing a huge improvement with heart rate accuracy. In my experience with the previous Galaxy Watch 6, errors with heart rate measurements were common. In the example above, the watch detected a heart rate of over 140bpm when I was just warming up for a calisthenics workout, not even remotely accurate. Other watches and a heart rate strap show that I barely exceed 100bpm in those conditions. There are some occasional blips with other workouts as well. While HR accuracy is not the worst out there, Samsung still has ways to improve.

What I absolutely love, though, is how Samsung presents all of its workout data. Runners should be especially happy as they get quite a few metrics with proper explanations that make them all easy to understand and digest. Other companies like Garmin could definitely take a note or two in how the data is presented.

For those who do work out regularly — a new Race feature will continuously track your routine and measure it against past performances in real time. Essentially, you will be racing against a recording of yourself from last time, to give you that extra bit of motivation.

The sleep tracker is now a Sleep AI Algorithm with new metrics for movement during sleep, sleep latency, heart and respiratory rate — these are all taken into account to give you a "sleep score" and help you improve on that habit. I love having this score and the breakdown for each night of sleep, and I wish rival Apple Watch would offer the same feature.

You probably, however, should not read too much into the data as it is not perfect. The Galaxy Watch tends to overcount awake time during the night, but it was quite good at detecting exactly when I felt asleep and when I woke up, which are the two most important numbers.

New is something Samsung calls Energy Score, which seems like a metric suspiciously similar to Garmin's Body Battery.

Unlike Body Battery, though, your Samsung Energy Score does not change throughout the day, so it's basically a value you get in the morning after you wake up. Samsung estimates this based on seven factors:

You also get a separate score for each of these categories, so on my worst day when I got a score of 55, I could see that I had overexerted myself with more than three hours of activity the previous day, and my sleeping HR and HRV were only "fair".

Speaking of HRV, Samsung's estimates are wildly different (above) what I get from all other watches I have tested. On Garmin and Apple Watches my HRV values hover around the 40ms mark, while with the Samsung my values are often above 100ms, which seems wrong.

There's also an entirely new metric — advanced glycation end products (AGEs) index, which measures biological aging based on dietary habits and lifestyle. Whatever that means. Samsung does not provide an official explanation of how this works, so we are supposed to just kind of blindly trust the company. I found that very odd, so until Samsung explains it in more detail, it's hard to put much faith in this number.

You also have all the features from previous Galaxy Watches, such as ECG and Blood Pressure, but especially for the last one, proceed with caution. You should know that blood pressure on the watch needs to be calibrated with a blood pressure monitor every once in a while and that might be finicky.

What is new is de novo certification for sleep apnea, meaning you can use this as an over-the-counter device for detecting sleep apnea, but it in no way guarantees accuracy.

There's also a new dual-pinch feature, which allows you to quickly interact with the Watch 7 or even the connected Galaxy Phone by simply bringing your fingers together in a rapid motion. Where have we seen that... ah, yes, it must have been one of the features that Samsung kind of copied from the Apple Watch Series 9. "Friendly" competition, some call it.

The keyword here is “supposedly”. In reality, the Galaxy Watch 7 that we used barely lasted 24 hours between charges. That is disappointing!

Reports say these depressing battery numbers are due to a software bug and that Samsung is working on a fix, which should come sooner rather than later. Hopefully, but right now, battery life is definitely on the sad side with the Watch 7.

There are no changes to charging speeds here, so expect to have your timepiece top up for about an hour every day.