. Now Ive been putting it through its paces, everything from a hard interval workout, including into the deep cities to test GPS.. Looking at the new routing and Track Back functionality out hiking, as well as checking out how things like battery life claims hold up and all that kind of goodness. So were gon na dive into all those new features, especially the Pro ones, and plenty more.. Note that ive put YouTube chapters along the bottom on there, so you can skip ahead to the section that you want. Also note. This video is definitely not sponsored. After the keynote. I went ahead and just simply ordered it myself and then also simply just picked it up this morning at the store., Which is probably a whole different funny video for another day., But for now Ive got the Pro here and … Ive been putting through its paces. Like i said. Keep in mind, I will do a full in depth review down the road here once Ive got much more detail and data on things like the battery life and the sleep tracking a longer term so definitely hit the subscribe button. So you dont miss on that here in a couple weeks now, for those of you that are unfamiliar with the pro edition ill spend like 60 seconds here, to kind of give you the quick landscape and then well go straight into the features. So there are two editions of the samsung galaxy watch: five theres, the pro and theres the none pro non pro unpro, not pro, and so this one here starts at 279 comes in two different sizes, 40 and 44 mil, and then this one here is at 449 And it comes in a 45 mil from a material standpoint.
The pro has a titanium case. They both have a sapphire crystal display in it, which is usually more scratch resistant, but the pro has a better sapphire crystal display. It has a 29 gpa versus the 24 gpa on the regular units. The pro also has this new clasp system on there versus the regular one does not samsung says both editions have a completely revamped sensor suite, including the ecg heart rate, as well as body composition. Sensors were going to test all those things, but in this video were going to test, in particular the optical heart rate side of it theyve also added a body temperature sensor, but thats only for sleeping at night ill go ahead and measure your body temperature, then, and Then all these editions have gps as well as wi, fi and bluetooth built into them, and then some editions have lte for direct cellular connectivity. Probably the biggest hardware difference between these two additions is the bigger battery. So the base 40 unit comes with a 284 milliamp hour battery. The 44 comes the 410 milliamp hour battery and then the pro edition thats, the 45 mil uh, comes with a 590 milliamp hour battery and samsung says with that. The pro edition should get up to 20 hours of gps on time and up to 80 hours of just regular smartwatch standby time and then to charge that bigger battery theres. A new charging cable that the cable can go from 0 to 45 and 30 minutes, which is pretty impressive, and then it can also go from zero to eight hours of sleep tracking in eight minutes, uh, its just handy in case you get to the end of The day and then realize youre a little bit short to get through the night for the sleep tracking and then just like with samsungs watch four, this one right here, uh it comes with googles, wear os, so its gon na use that new platform, but it does Have a samsungs one ui system on top of it, but it is, though, lacking the bezel that you would have had on the older units that has now gone for just purely a touch bezel, which you know kind of works.
The same way, kind of not really also its a heck of a lot thicker like just to put these side by side. This is definitely a bit of a beak cake. This pro unit here kind of reminds me of like a cargo ship uh, its just theres. No tapering whatsoever on the side right here, so you just look at it and its just like boom. I am here and in town so with that lets dive straight into the first new features, which is the compass itself, and this is all we focused on the pro. So this is the compass watch face. I point out. This is not the stock or default watch face. You actually have to kind of build this entire thing yourself, which is sort of strange, but whatever and youll see, as i rotate this here – that north right there changes with that. If we go outside, you can see the exact same thing as well, and this is one of those features that samsung aligns to that kind of pro thinking having a compass and a watch face as far as the accuracy that um it seems a little bit iffy Just to kind of illustrate this: this is north right now so come on this side of the table, and if i just do like one rotation of this uh now north is over here uh and you know, if i rotate slowly, you can see it sticks there, But it doesnt seem to like be always super accurate, like it kind of comes and goes like.
I do it again now. North north is over there, but if i rotate too quickly, then yeah thats thats, not super pro in any case lets get on to the actual mapping and navigation. So, with the pro edition, you have the ability to import a gpx file into the watch and then navigate atop that so to kind of walk you through how this works. You need to first get a gpx file to the watch itself, so you need to create a gpx file, theres tons of tools out there to do that. In my case, i use strava to create the route and theres an option in strava to export gpx. Once i did that, i emailed it to myself, because i created it on the desktop so emailed its myself and then i saved it into my samsung phone and then from there i open up a samsung health app and after that you dive into sport mode settings. Then you just fumble around for a while its actually not super obvious at all, and it changes depending on which time you open it the first time its a different place. It is the second time, but eventually you get to the routes area and then you can open up on the files on your phone and then import that gpx file in once youve imported that gpx file into your phone itll go ahead and sync it to the Watch itself now theres two different sport modes that support routing today one is cycling and the other is hiking theres, no routing support today for running or walking or any other sport modes just cycling and hiking and thats consistent with what samsung has said like in a Pr standpoint uh, though, in their video, they noted marathon, rail marathon or cycling courses as you as someone who marathons occasionally, i dont typically use the cycling sport mode or the hiking sport mode for a marathon, but hopefully thats something thatll get fixed down the road.
Also, hopefully, this is a great time to whack that, like button down there, it really does help with this video and the channel quite a bit. So once youve got it on the watch itself, youre ready to roll youre going to swipe a few times over to the menu that shows basically your routes and you go ahead and choose the route that you want. The most recent route added to the watch will be the one on the top, but you can look at other routes. You have there, you can tap it. You can see a map of it. You cant, like pinch and zoom, on this particular map that you can once you start, but you can go ahead and reverse the route which i appreciate, thats a nice little touch and then once youre ready, you just simply hit start at that point you get the Three second countdown, like usual and then well, go off and find gps. This will take anywhere from like five seconds to 45 seconds, depending on you know where you are and whatnot and then once thats good itll start giving audio prompts of where you need to go ill. Give you turn by turn directions, meaning as you approach a turn about 50 meters out in the case of hiking itll, stay 36 meters from starting point. Take the next right and then, if you miss the turn like, if you just completely ignored, itll, tell youre off course after about 50 meters, or so note that you do not need your phone for this, i went off on one test hike without my phone at All i did this just fine, though keep in mind you wont, get any of the map, information saved or cached to the watch without your phone, so youll just see the track like a breadcrumb trail, but it will give you the off course warnings without your phone.
Just fine, but in terms of having that map layer below it, you need to have your phone with you. You can also tap on the screen if you want to and go ahead and kind of zoom around or move around the map to see where the route is and then you can reset back to where you are in terms of like real world usability id say This is fine. If youve got like clear sunny day, you can see all the trails around you know whats going on, but i would definitely not trust this if theres lots of trails and trees that are really close and parallel to each other, that maybe you need to be absolutely On one trail or one side of the river or one side of the stream versus the other, because it wont warn you until youre about 50 or so meters off which think about thats like a half a football field away and thats. Quite a ways to be potentially on the wrong trail, especially if, like the fork of a trail or something like that, where you may have just gone off and the true trails go parallel for a while, you could be going for quite a while before you found Out youre on the wrong trail, so that gets us to the next feature, which is the back track ability this works across the board, so it doesnt seem to be limited to either hiking or cycling and allows you to backtrack to your starting point.
So what you do is you basically swipe to the side. Go into settings and youll see the backtrack option when you tap that it starts tracking back your original course now. This is following your exact route that you came out to that point in so its really a deal for like out and backs where youre going out somewhere and then you say, yep im done im going to come on back again, its not good at all for Loops or lollipops or figure eights, or anything where you just want to go directly back to start in the shortest manner. This is going to take you the exact same way. You got there, including any errors. You made all the way back again, but navigation wise its identical to what you had the first time around with regular navigation, except now your endpoint is simply your start point if that makes sense, so nows a good time to talk about the running side. In that new biometric suite samsung says they have a new biometric suite here. That includes a new optic heart rate sensor. It looks pretty much identical to the existing optical heart rate, sensor uh, but maybe theres some differences inside of it uh. Nonetheless, i was gon na go out and do a bit of a comparison interval run. If you will, the run would start off as steady state and then every two kilometers id throw down a hard interval uh to kind of push that optical heart rate sensor.
For comparison on the other wrist at an apple watch series 7 running the new watch os 9 beta. I also had a chest, strap on and then further i had the whoop 4.0 optical heart rate band up there, as well as the aura ring here, also recording. So i had a lot of data from a heart rate standpoint being recorded and then on the gps side of things i had the garmin 400 955 uh gps watch being handheld as well as the coreos vertex 2.. All those watches were properly separated out. So only one watch worn per risk, otherwise you can impact optical heart rate uh, and then they were separated out on the hands so that i dont have any impacts to gps either. Finally, from a route standpoint, the route started off kind of easy on a path, and then i got into some more tree cover and then i went to like downtown building hell. Basically, three sweeps up and down of the business district on different streets here in amsterdam. Uh so really tall buildings very, very close together only about two lanes with between them uh just to really test out this to the max, and after that i finished back in the trees again, so starting off with the optical heart rate side of things, you can See it gets off to a bit of a slow start, like its just kind of like waking up first run just lagging behind a little bit, but after a couple minutes it locks on and honestly it was fine for pretty much the rest of the run towards The end of the run, i did four hard intervals like really hard intervals, full flat out intervals, and you can see it lagged a little bit there, but certainly better than the whoop strap and overall, pretty good.
So, overall, in this first interval run pretty decent on the optical heart rate. I have no like major qualms of this at all, so lets switch over to the gps side of things uh, so you can see here as we get going on this path, its pretty straightforward, its definitely the least accurate of the group, its just kind of like Wobbling a little bit its not like horrible, its, not bad its just not like its not really spot on, and that mostly remains the case, the entire time until we got to the city once we got to the city, though its definitely wobbling around and going through A lot of buildings, its not nearly as accurate as a multi band on the 400 955 is, but it didnt have the complete and total meltdown that the apple watch series 7 did and its notable. This is the first time ive ever seen in seven years, an apple watch meltdown as badly as it did here. Uh in this section on this run, and i had neither phone for the apple watch or the samsung watch with me. I so was not using my phone for gps. Both of those phones were at home, so that was not going to leverage that in any way shape or form. Once i got out of the district area, the apple watch snapped back to reality, so im not really sure whats going on there. As you can see, the samsung watch track throughout that its kind of like not great but not horrendous, its just sort of like whatever, but overall it wasnt a dumpster fire, which is sometimes like the bar for success uh.
So what about battery life? So in this case, i basically took it straight off. The charger was 100 off. The charger went outside so lets just call it 99. At the start of the run. When i got back, it was at 91, so well call it like nine percent. Eight nine percent for the fun of it now, in this case the run took about 50 minutes uh. So if you extrapolate that out, youre looking at roughly 10 hours of gps battery time for the pro edition, samsung is claiming 20 hours and in my case, for the run i didnt even have the always on display on at all. It just simply was in the timeout mode automatically, so basically the best case scenario so were basically like half of the battery claim, but i want to kind of see how this rolls over the next couple weeks in terms of like daily usage. At this point its too early to say, i would say its trending more towards like a strong two and a half days than it is the three and a half days that samsung is advertising with 80 hours, but, like i said, i will keep on looking at The battery aspects over the next couple weeks, especially if theres any software updates uh this one – did have a software update this morning. So it is on the freshest current version of software thats out there in terms of the pro moniker and might be a bit of a stretch.
Weve seen many companies add pro to not just their watches, but also other consumer products, even apples rumored to be doing it for the apple watch series aids uh. If i look at the features that it considers pro here, mainly like that basic kind of breadcrumb trail routing, as well as the ability to do backtrack or track back uh, neither of those are really too pro. In the running watch world there have been watches down to like even 150 gps running watches from tomtom and polar and others that have those features for almost a better part of a decade. Still, there are plenty of other features on the samsung watches. That would be considered more pro, but those features are indeed on the base edition as well uh, so im looking forward to seeing what samsung can add to this watch over the next year and firmware updates. That gives it that kind of pro feeling given not just the higher end price, but simply the name pro anyways. Hopefully you found this interesting or useful. If so, go ahead and like that, like button, the bottom there or subscribe for plenty more sports technology, goodness, i think we got a pretty busy fall.L-jOFSWuDKU
