Samsung Galaxy Watch5 Pro Review

Samsung has been at the forefront of wearables even before they were the “In” thing, and through the years, the Galaxy Watch series has made big strikes in the wearable category.

This year, Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 series added a few more improvements to the previous model that make them worth considering.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is perhaps one of the most feature-packed smartwatches you can get today. Right out of the box, you get a harder sapphire glass display, titanium watch case, and much larger capacity battery — all of which add to “ruggedness” features when taking this on an outdoor workout or exercise.

While the Galaxy Watch5 will come in either 40mm or 44m models, the Galaxy Watch5 Pro will come in a single 45mm model. It’s 10.5mm thick and weighs 46.5 grams.

The face is a 1.4-inch Super AMOLED Full Color Always On Display with a 450×450 pixel resolution.

We also liked the raised lip around the rim, which I think is a great design feature that adds protection to the sapphire glass in case your drop the watch our accidentally bang or scrape it against hard surface. It also helps with the touch bezel capability by providing some tactile feedback to your fingers when navigating the UI.

When paired with Samsung Health, you get exclusive features such as Route Workout, Turn-by-Turn Directions, and Track Back. If you go on treks, hiking or biking, these features might appeal to you the most. It might not match the feature-rich models from Garmin or Polar but for the casual user, the Watch5 Pro will do just fine for most outdoor activities you want to track.

The Galaxy Watch4 ran on Wear OS which was jointly built by Samsung and Google. This is the same operating system running on the new Galaxy Watch 5 Pro. The marriage between Wear OS 3.5 and One UI Watch 4.5 allowed seamless integration with Google Assistant, Google Maps, and other third-party apps (so yeah, goodbye Bixby).

Under the hood, there’s an Exynos W920 processor with 1.5GB of RAM and 16GB of storage which is more than enough room for apps. Other features include support for LTE, Bluetooth 5.2, Wi-Fi, and Samsung’s BioActive Sensor.

The IP68 water resistance is expected for a smartwatch of this caliber and comes with a 5ATM pressure rating which means you can go down up to 50 meters of depth. You can take this for shorts period of time swimming in the pool or ocean, bring to the shower or under the rain. Moreover, the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is also certified for the MIL-STS-816 standard. That means it can withstand several harsh conditions, including exposure to extreme temperatures, shock, drops, humidity, and snow.

The Galaxy Watch5 Pro promises up to 80 hours of battery life on a single full charge (20 hours with GPS enabled). We never really got close to the promised 80 hours in the weeks that we used it. On normal days, we’d say we’d spend about 30-40% of battery life due to all the notifications, alerts and health tracking that are enabled. If we turn off some of the features, like Always-On Display, we’d average about 3 full days on a single charge.

Again, the results may vary depending on how you use the watch and what features you want enabled all the time. For folks who love the outdoors and want GPS to be activated, you’ll find yourself needing to recharge by the end of the day’s trek.

The 590mAh internal battery recharges in about 1.5 hours from fully drained to fully charged. This is using the 10W wireless charger that came with it.

Here are the top features we liked about the Watch5 Pro:

• Solid and lightweight due to titanium casing
• Sapphire glass AMOLED screen
• Better battery life than previous generation, but not much
• 5ATM and IP68 water resistance
• Tons of health sensors

Here are the things we think it missed:

• Still a bit chunky and heavy
• Battery could still be improved

What makes the Galaxy Watch5 Pro such an attractive smartwatch is the slew of features that came with it — Sleep Coaching, Blood Pressure, Body Composition, Sweat Loss, ECG, Heart Rate and Blood Oxygen. That’s on top of the outdoor and workout features.