What it's like to wear Samsung's new Galaxy Watch Active 2

Samsung's got a brand new smartwatch. The Samsung Galaxy watch active too. And I got a chance to wear it. It is the second big Samsung Smartwatch this year. How is it different than the Samsung Galaxy watch active that came out alongside the Galaxy S10. Well I'm going to tell you now I have right here. The Samsung Galaxy watch active. I don't have the watch too yet though you'll see that I got to wear it and play around with it. The Active took the approach of being a more affordable and sleeker version of Samsung's previous smart watches, ones that looked more like traditional watches and had this rotating bezel on the outside. The Watch Active dropped that, but it gained the ability to be more affordable, have the smaller design. Have this easier touch screen interface. And to charge from Samsung newest phone, which is great. In fact I don't even know where the charger is, from my watch active. And so I'm glad that I can just charge it right from the back of S10. That feature is still on the Galaxy watch active two. But it adds some health features, notably ECG But just wait ECG much like the Apple Watch has on the series for can gain a extra heart reading through a time sample that can look at extra detailed information about your heart rhythm. That can matter if you want to check out any problems in a red mia in your heart that, you might wanna tell your doctor about. But Samsung doesn't have FDA clearance for this yet. In fact is not cleared for any markets yet, which means that we're probably not gonna see this activated until maybe sometime next year. One thing that is great about the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 is the bezel's back, that little rotating thing kind of. It's a Touch edge now and so they have take response if you've used Samsung's edge phones and touch the edge and be able to swipe them. The idea is similar here in that if you move your finger around the edge of the display it will be able to swipe between apps and you'll get this really strong haptic feedback like a rhythmic tapping. That feels like clicks. I felt it was really good and I really liked the bezel before. I think I might like this new feature with touch better because I found that I could operate it with smaller turns on my wrist. And it didn't take up so much space that it felt like I had to turn it. And if you were a Samsung Galaxy Watch owner or one of the Gear watches, and you had that bezel, one small thing is that you had to do that to turn it on versus touch the screen. Now, you can touch the screen to turn it on or you can touch the edge. You could do whatever you want. Samsung has some extra health features beyond ECG on this watch that promise better heart rate and general fitness tracking accuracy. Kinda similar to what Apple did with the Apple Watch S4 in that it could provide better tracking overall. The heart rate monitor now uses eight LEDs instead of four in the Galaxy Watch Active. And the accelerometer supposed to register 32 G's of force versus 16 G's before Apple use that stuff to do things like fall detection, which Samsung may or may not have on the Galaxy watch active to the watch act of two also comes in two sizes now, 40 and 44 millimeter The 44 millimeter is kind of the size of the larger Apple Watch and the 40 is count of besides the smaller Apple Watch. But the 40 millimeter watch active too actually has a slightly bigger screen than the 40 millimeter watch active from earlier this year. So that's nice. You're paying up for the watch active to It's $279 or $299, versus $199 for the Watch Active. And that might make you feel good if you bought the Watch Active, because you still got the more affordable watch, but you may not have the premium watch. There's also an LTE equipped version of the Watch Active 2. Samsung's done cellular-equipped smart watches forever. They were the first ones to really be doing it. Now on this new version, you should be able to do a lot of key away from phone features things like getting calls connecting to social media, Twitter, YouTube being able to listen to music Spotify is going to be supported for streaming. So that's really cool but the price on those is TBD. Samsung says dependent on carriers, So we'll have to see how expensive that gets. In the past they've definitely been high $300 range types of watches, which I would expect. Plus, you have to pay a monthly fee to your carrier to use those services, which isn't always worth it. But the design on the LTE version is a bit nicer. It's a stainless steel case versus the aluminum case on the Watch Active 2 that's bluetooth. One cool style note; now, this does exist on other watches, but I think it's pretty cool on this one, is a style guide that helps you pick a watch face to match what clothing you have. So the idea is that you take a photo of your shirt pattern or whatever you have And the Samsung Watch app, the Galaxy Watch Active app will pick a new background, generate one, that you could pick out like a tie or pocket square. So you could wear a watch face that matches what you've got. I was weirdly charmed by this. I think it's cool. I feel like more watches should have that, because picking a watch face is a fun but annoying process. Another cool feature on the watch active two, and maybe it will come to other galaxy watch models, is the ability to add google translate on wrist. So, that's a useful feature. I'd love to see more google features on Samsung watches even though they run tizen, which is a separate software ecosystem, separate apps. Adding more google features would be a great move. I'm still not wild about the fact Tha Samsung is [UNKNOWN] coming up with two watches staggered over the course of the year. It makes it really confusing whether you're looking for watch that's coming out alongside the Galaxy phones or alongside the Note phones. The Samsung Galaxy watch active two is going to come in four colors, black, silver, gold and [UNKNOWN]. And it's coming out September 27th, so that's gonna be into the fall and probably along side a new Apple Watch and maybe other wearables. So how will it compare? We're gonna have to see and the Samsung Galaxy Watch app does seem like it's going to be the best Android smart watch out there, but if you've got a Samsung phone or any Android phone. It even pairs with iPhones but the features Are not that great, it definitely looks like one of the greatest ones, I think it would be worth going to the 279 model over the watch active, but stay tuned for more details on it, and we'll see how well the fitness in coaching modes go, we're gonna have to see how that plays out when we test it.