Samsung smartwatches

Samsung has been making smart watches since 2013. These have been marketed under the Galaxy name since 2019. Before that, Samsung also used the Gear name, particularly for fitness trackers. South Korean Samsung's first smart watch combined both names; the Galaxy Gear.

Samsung Galaxy Watch

The first Galaxy Watch new style was announced in August 2018. Samsung uses a circular design and gave the watch a successor every year. The first generation Watch came out in two sizes; 42 and 46mm. Successors also came out in two sizes although the size did differ over the years.

Within the Galaxy Watch series, Samsung also released an Active variant a few times. This looked slightly more sophisticated and was intended to appeal to a female audience in particular. Later Galaxy Watch models were given a slimmer look, eliminating the need for an Active model.

Connection with smartphone

To let your Galaxy Watch connect to your Android smartphone, you need to download the Galaxy Wearable app from the Google Play Store. You don't strictly need a Samsung smartphone for this. Then connect to the watch using Bluetooth.

Earlier Galaxy Watch models could also be connected to an iPhone but since the use of Wear OS as the operating system, this no longer works.

Tizen and Wear OS

Samsung has been using the Wear OS operating system for its smart watches since the Samsung Galaxy Watch4 from 2021. Like Android, this platform is released by Google. Before that, Samsung used the Tizen operating system.

Tizen was mainly maintained by Samsung and resulted from MeeGo and Bada. Apart from the operating system, Samsung uses its own developed shell called One UI Watch. Like One UI for Android smartphone, this shell determines how icons look, what colour schemes are used and how sounds sound.