Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra Review (2024)

With top-notch build quality, a bright display, and responsive (and customizable) controls, the $649.99 Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra makes its case as the best Wear OS smartwatch for outdoor excursions. Detailed sleep analysis, AI-powered health insights, and multisport tracking round out its impressive feature set, along with battery life that lasts more than a day. On the downside, the device costs more than twice as much as the excellent Galaxy Watch 7 and can't handle water sports like the $799 Apple Watch Ultra 2. The Galaxy Watch Ultra is ultimately a worthwhile purchase if you have extreme exercise habits or aren't always near an outlet, but most Android users are better off with the Watch 7 thanks to its still-durable design, similar tracking abilities, and much lower price.

Design: Large, But Several Color and Band Choices

The Galaxy Watch Ultra comes in a single 47mm size with LTE connectivity (there's no Wi-Fi-only model). Color options include Titanium Gray, Titanium Silver, or Titanium White. You can pick between a durable silicone band (Marine), a breathable fabric band (Trail), and a standard rubber band (Peakform) to go along with the watch. The Marine option is available in dark gray, orange, or white, while the other two come only in dark gray. None of these selections adds to the cost, though they have different shipping dates as of publishing. Samsung sent me a Titanium Gray watch with an orange Marine band for this review.

You can buy multiple bands to suit different occasions; they attach and detach with a one-click system. Push a new band into place until it clicks or detach it with a button on the bottom of the watch. I found attaching bands as easy as advertised, though the detach button sometimes got stuck. Keep in mind that older Galaxy Watch bands won’t fit this model.

(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)

The Marine and Trail bands have breathable gaps at their edges, but these make an already big watch look and feel even bigger. The Watch Ultra weighs 2.13 ounces and measures 0.47 inch thick. Even though the Apple Watch Ultra 2 has a larger 49mm display, weighs slightly more at 2.16 ounces, and is thicker at 0.57 inch, the Galaxy Watch Ultra takes up more space on my wrist because of the square face around the circular display and the aforementioned band gaps.

Since I’m a big dude, I didn’t mind the look, feel, and size of the Watch Ultra. It’s certainly a large watch, but it’s still comfortable to wear. If you’re looking for something smaller, the Galaxy Watch 7 comes in 40mm and 44mm versions. Both Watch 7 models are thinner at 0.38 inch and weigh less (1.0 ounce for the 40mm version, 1.2 ounces for the 44mm version). For a particularly petite and stylish option, check out the Garmin Lily 2.

Build Quality: Especially Rugged Hardware

Samsung bills the Galaxy Watch Ultra as durable enough for adventures, so it has a few technical advantages over the Galaxy Watch 7. It uses a titanium body instead of an aluminum one, for instance, and gets a 10ATM water-resistance rating rather than a 5ATM one. That last spec means you can submerge it at depths of up to 328 feet in calm fresh or salt water, up from 164 feet. Samsung says the Watch Ultra can survive at more extreme altitudes ranging from 1,640 feet below sea level to 29,527 feet above it, too.

Both watches are impervious to dust and water exposure, thanks to their IP68 ratings. They also meet the MIL-STD-810H certification, which means they can endure extreme temperature changes, blowing sand, and other environmental stressors such as vibration and shock. Samsung claims that both models can function between -4 and 131 degrees Fahrenheit. For reference, Samsung’s last endurance-focused smartwatch, the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, had a titanium case and the same military certification but only 5ATM of water resistance and no extreme altitude rating.

The enhanced durability of the Watch Ultra certainly makes it more suitable than alternatives for everything from climbing to hiking to mountain biking, but its increased water rating doesn’t actually add much practical value: The fine print specifies that the device isn't suitable for water sports like scuba diving or jet skiing.

To clarify, the Watch Ultra's 10ATM rating relates more to the pressure from water instead of the water itself and the specified depth rating applies only for up to 10 minutes. Neither fresh nor salt water should be an issue at shallow depths for extended periods, however, so snorkeling and spelunking are fine. You can also wear it to swim laps in a pool, of course, though the Watch 7 works just as well for that.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra (left) and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 (right) (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)

For the most part, the Watch Ultra keeps up with its clear inspiration, the Apple Watch Ultra 2. Apple’s adventure watch shares the same military equipment certification and altitude range, but it's much more suitable for water activities thanks to its superior WR100 water pressure rating and EN13319 certification (the international standard for diving accessories). You can dive and jet ski to your heart’s content with the Apple Watch Ultra 2, and it even has a diving computer for your undersea expeditions.

Specs and Features: Some Key Upgrades Over the Watch 7

The Galaxy Watch Ultra features a bright 1.5-inch, 480-by-480-pixel Super AMOLED screen that is easy to see even in direct sunlight thanks to its 3,000 nits of brightness. It gets just as bright as the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and outshines the Galaxy Watch 7 (2,000 nits).

Like the Watch 7, the Watch Ultra has a 3nm Exynos W1000 processor with 2GB of memory and 32GB of storage. It runs Google’s Wear OS 5 software with Samsung’s One UI 6 interface. Both are one generation newer than on the Galaxy Watch 6. Wear OS 5 brings performance and efficiency advancements over previous versions, while One UI 6 adds options for photo editing, translation, widgets, and more. In addition to LTE connectivity, the Galaxy Watch Ultra has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3, and NFC for mobile payments.

Otherwise, it shares a few other upgrades with the Watch 7 over the company’s previous models. For instance, it uses a dual-frequency GPS to better track your location in the presence of tall buildings and trees. It also gets FDA approval to detect sleep apnea, as well as advanced glycation end products (AGEs) index tracking to provide a more detailed picture of your metabolism.

Thanks to Galaxy AI, the Watch Ultra encapsulates all of its tracked fitness and sleep metrics into a holistic Energy Score on a scale from 0 to 100. Galaxy AI then provides Wellness Tips that offer guidance on how to improve your score and feel better. It measures the amount of sleep you get, along with your blood oxygen level, heart rate, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and sleep stages. For the snoring detection, you need to keep your Samsung phone nearby. If you run a consistent route while exercising, the Watch Ultra can even learn your pattern so that you can race against yourself.

The Watch 6 was no slouch at health or fitness tracking, and the Galaxy Watch Ultra carries over its sensors and capabilities. It has a built-in accelerometer, a barometer, a blood oxygen monitor, a gyroscope, a heart rate monitor, a pedometer, and a temperature sensor. The Watch Ultra can automatically or manually track lots of different workouts, while incorporating customizable target heart rate thresholds for additional guidance. Additionally, you can take an ECG with the watch and measure body composition metrics like body fat percentage and body mass index (BMI), similar to a smart scale.

(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)

Above and beyond the Watch 7, the Watch Ultra has a customizable Quick Button and an 85db siren. It contains 13 LEDs and an improved BioActive Sensor for more precise heart rate readings and better sleep tracking. It even has a multisport tile for tracking triathlons and can calculate your maximum cycling power (called Functional Power Threshold) in four minutes if you pair your phone with your bike's power meter.

The Apple Watch Ultra 2 also has a customizable button called an Action Button and a slightly louder 86db siren, but it doesn't detect snoring, sleep apnea, or AGEs. In the US, it can’t monitor blood oxygen saturation.

Other Wear OS competitors aren't quite as capable. The OnePlus Watch 2 doesn't support ECGs, skin temperature readings, fall detection, or period tracking. The Google Pixel Watch 2 doesn't allow for on-demand blood oxygen saturation (SpO2) measurements. Neither measures your body composition metrics, detects snoring, senses sleep apnea, or tracks AGEs.

Like other Wear OS watches, the Samsung Galaxy Ultra supports only Android phones, so you’re out of luck if you have an iPhone. Specifically, the Watch Ultra works with Android phones running Android 11 or later, though some of the more advanced features, like snoring detection and AI insights, require a Samsung phone. The OnePlus Watch 2 and Pixel Watch 2 don’t restrict as many features to first-party phones.

Setup and Controls: The Big Screen Makes Things Better

During testing, I consistently appreciated both the bigger screen on the Galaxy Watch Ultra and its customizable Quick Button. I set the Quick Button to open the My Exercises app, but you can also configure it to turn on the watch’s water lock, start a stopwatch, or turn on the watch’s flashlight. You activate the watch’s siren by holding this button for five seconds. You can pick what you want that button to do during the setup or later via the Galaxy Wearable app. Aside from the watch itself, the box includes a wristband, a magnetic charging cable with no brick, and a booklet with terms and conditions.

(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)

Hold the power button to turn your watch on and get started with the setup. If you have a Samsung phone, you should see a pop-up that prompts you to pair the watch. Otherwise, you can pair the watch via your phone's regular Bluetooth menu. Either way, you need to sign in to Samsung’s Galaxy Wearable app with your Google account next.

The Galaxy Wearable app then helps you connect to your home’s Wi-Fi and configure LTE service. The setup process is quick and mostly instructional. You need to agree to a lot of terms and conditions, as well as approve a variety of permissions. You then specify which wrist you will wear the watch on, your preferred orientation of the buttons, and the Quick Button function before the app walks you through the controls and various features.

Pressing the top button brings you back to your main watch face from wherever you are. Double-tap it to go back to your last used app, hold it briefly to access Samsung’s digital assistant Bixby, and hold it for a full five seconds to call emergency services. The bottom button takes you back a screen.

(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)

You can also control the watch via the touch screen. Swipe down from the top to show a customizable Quick Panel with options such as Do Not Disturb and Energy Saver. Swipe up for your apps, to the right for notifications, and to the left for a customizable arrangement of tiles with options like Calendar, Fitness Stats, and Weather. New for this generation, you can use gestures like double-tapping your fingers, knocking your fist, and rotating your wrist to snap pictures or answer calls.

You can customize tiles, apps, and watch faces from the device itself for the most part, or otherwise through the Galaxy Wearable app. You also need the Samsung Health app to see extra details for tracked metrics like heart rate, sleep, and steps, and the Samsung Health Monitor app for more ECG and Sleep Apnea insights. I dislike the need for three different apps to make the most of the watch, but Apple has a similar count. Meanwhile, the Pixel Watch 2 bars some of its advanced metrics behind a $9.99-per-month subscription fee.

The Wearable, Health, and Health Monitor apps (Credit: Samsung/PCMag)

Outside of the Quick Button, the experience of setting up, controlling, and even customizing the Galaxy Watch Ultra is the same as on the Galaxy Watch 7. Check out my review of the Galaxy Watch 7 for more details. Since both watches run Wear OS, the app selection is also the same. Apple's watchOS still offers a better variety, but you can likely find whatever popular third-party option you want on either.

Battery Life: Improved, But Not Spectacular

Customizable Quick Button and a bigger screen aside, my favorite upgrade of the Galaxy Watch Ultra over the Watch 7 is the improved battery life: It can actually last more than a day away from a charger.

The Watch Ultra has a 590mAh battery, a sizable step up from the 425mAh and 300mAh cells for the 44mm and 40mm versions of the Watch 7. According to Samsung, the Watch Ultra should last 60 hours without any power-saving modes active, 100 hours in the standard power-saving mode, and 48 hours in the exercise power-saving mode.

The watch lasted just over 46 hours in my battery rundown test, in which I had the always-on display active, didn’t use any power-saving modes, and went for a 30-minute run with the GPS on. I also used the watch’s Sleep Mode (turns off the screen and silences notifications) during the roughly seven-hour stretches of sleep over the two nights within that period.

The Galaxy Watch 5 Pro lasted 57 hours under similar conditions, while the Apple Watch Ultra 2 lasted 55 hours. Both of those models are slightly more suitable for weekend getaways or excursions without a charger.

Battery life has been an issue with Samsung's smartwatches going back to the Galaxy Watch 6. The Galaxy Watch 7 didn’t fix the issue, clocking in at 22 hours on this test. At the very least, the Galaxy Watch Ultra has a battery that can easily last a full 24 hours. Given the various power-saving options, you probably could get a weekend out of it if you're careful. Overall, it's the first Samsung smartwatch in several years for which battery life isn’t an active detriment. Still, you should check out the OnePlus Watch 2 if you’re looking for a Wear OS watch that actually shines in this department; it lasted 69 hours between charges with the always-on display active.

The Watch Ultra recharged from 1% to 100% in a reasonable two hours, which exceeded the 88 minutes the Galaxy Watch 7 required to recharge. That makes sense given the larger battery size. I charged it with the included cable, but the Watch Ultra does support wireless charging.

Health and Exercise: Holistic, Detailed Insights

The Galaxy Watch Ultra delivers better holistic health monitoring than the Watch 7 since you can wear it for more than a full 24-hour cycle. During testing, both the AI-generated Energy Score and Wellness Tips made sense in the context of my life.

(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)

The former encapsulates the amount and quality of your sleep alongside your activity from the previous day to assess your well-being. One day, I earned a score of 63 out of 100; it docked me for getting too much exercise. The Wellness Tip noted that because I was active for so much longer than my average, it could lead to overexertion. The day before, I earned a 68. The Wellness Tip that day centered around my high heart rate when I went to bed. I had indeed been hanging with friends until late that night and didn’t take much time to unwind before trying to sleep.

This holistic advice is most similar to Garmin’s Body Battery feature on recent wearables like the Vivoactive 5. But whereas Samsung offers a static number for the day based on the day before, Garmin’s metric more usefully fluctuates based on your current state of being and activity level. Still, Samsung is ahead of other Wear OS competition on this front. Apple is rolling out a Training Load feature with its upcoming watchOS 11 software that also monitors your exercise strain over a rolling 14-day period. The feature estimates your exertion level for various exercises on a scale from 1 to 10. Training Load is a little more specific to preparing for an event, whereas Garmin and Samsung focus on general wellness.

Aside from the holistic scores, the Galaxy Watch Ultra provides tons of detail about the exercises it tracks. Using the multisport exercise tile is simple and intuitive. You can pick a preset trio if training for a triathlon (swimming, biking, running), a duathlon (running, biking, running), or an aquathlon (running, swimming, running). You can also create a custom trio with options including biking, indoor biking, mountain biking, open-water swimming, pool swimming, outdoor running, and treadmill running.

(Credit: Andrew Gebhart)

You can set duration, distance, and heart rate zone targets for any of the exercises and enable audio feedback on your progress toward those targets. To switch from one exercise to the next, simply press and hold the Quick Button. The Quick Button further comes in handy for tracking individual exercises: You can tap it to pause or resume your progress. As on the Galaxy Watch 7, you can also swipe right for a menu of options and swipe left for media controls during workouts. The watch supports a nice variety of exercises; I was pleased to find elliptical, rowing, and stair machine options to match my gym routine.

The Watch Ultra was pretty reliable at automatically starting a workout when I went out for a walk or run and forgot to manually turn on tracking. It more frequently tracked a walking workout as I led my day-to-day life than the Apple Watch Ultra 2, though the latter more readily recognized machine workouts at the gym.

To test the Watch Ultra's accuracy, I went for a 30-minute run while wearing both the Galaxy Watch Ultra and the Apple Watch Ultra 2. The Galaxy Watch Ultra consistently showed a similar heart rate as the Apple Watch Ultra 2, staying within two to three beats per minute (BPM). Toward the end of my run, I sprinted for various intervals to see how well the Galaxy Watch Ultra kept up with drastic changes; it fared admirably. The variance between it and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 widened a little during those intervals, but they always settled near the same number, even at high intensities.

(Credit: Samsung/PCMag)

This matched my experience with the Galaxy Watch 7 and shows that the BioActive Sensor is better this time around. The Galaxy Watch 6 suffered some issues on this front. Interestingly, whereas the Galaxy Watched 7 showed minor inaccuracies on my route and distance, the Galaxy Watch Ultra got both completely correct. Looking at my mapped route in the Samsung Health app, I could even see where I veered around a walker.

Aside from duration, distance, and heart rate, the Watch Ultra tracks a lot of metrics during a run. You can see your cadence and heart rate zones, as well as check granular form metrics like asymmetry, contact time, flight time, regularity, stiffness, and vertical. It tracks VO2 Max (maximal oxygen consumption) to gauge your general physical fitness, too.

To track recovery, the Galaxy Watch Ultra shows your heart rate for the two minutes after a workout and compares it with your heart rate at the end of the workout.

Body and Sleep Metrics: Mostly Accurate

Measuring your body composition requires you to wear the watch, put the ring finger and middle finger of your opposite hand on the two buttons, and hold your arms up. You also need to enter your weight so it can get an accurate reading. The numbers from the Galaxy Watch Ultra are similar to those from the Watch 7. My body fat percentage skewed high but my BMI (a measure of your body weight in relation to your height) matched those of the accurate HumeHealth Body Pod.

Finally, I tested the Galaxy Watch Ultra’s sleep monitoring against that of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 and a nearby Nest Hub for three nights. Despite its large size, the Galaxy Watch Ultra didn’t bother me while I was asleep. The sleep stages chart showed a strange gap in the data on two of the testing nights, similar to the gap I saw when testing the Watch 7, but the numbers still ended up close to the readings from the Apple and Nest devices.

On the first night, the Samsung watch recorded 5 hours and 59 minutes of sleep compared with 6:08 for the Nest and 5:54 for the Apple Watch. On the next night, Samsung gave me credit for 6:51, compared with 7:26 from Nest and 7:07 from the Apple Watch. The Watch Ultra skews low, possibly because of those gaps in data, but not quite as low as the Watch 7.

(Credit: Samsung/PCMag)

Otherwise, the respiratory rate was the same across all three devices, while the Apple and Samsung watches indicated similar heart rate numbers. The sleep stages charts all matched, too. I appreciated the additional info from Samsung’s holistic sleep score and sleep score factors like physical recovery, restfulness, and mental recovery.

Verdict: The Most Durable, Feature-Rich Wear OS Watch

The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra should hold plenty of appeal if you’re training for a triathlon or are currently planning your next mountain biking trip: It's quite durable and very capable of accurately tracking a wide range of exercise metrics. This model also has quite a few advantages over the Galaxy Watch 7, namely, much longer battery life, a brighter screen, and a customizable Quick Button. Finally, its AI-based health metrics and advanced sleep tracking keep it ahead of Wear OS competitors. All of those features come at a very high cost and result in a large watch size, however, so most Android users should still buy the more affordable and slimmer Watch 7. And if you are on the Apple side of things, you can rest easy knowing that the Watch Ultra 2 still has the edge on battery life and for extreme water sports.