IIswitched from an iPhone to the Google Pixel 2 a few years ago after thinking about the move for a long time. My Apple Watch had held me back. The watch is an expensive device, but it would be rendered a paperweight if I used a Pixel full time, because Apple doesn’t allow it to work with Android phones. There were few alternative watches that would work with my Pixel — or at least few that seemed at all appealing.
Ultimately, I still decided to change over to a Pixel, which had become compelling enough despite the lack of Apple Watch support, and gave up wearing a smartwatch altogether.
But now I’ve finally found a smartwatch I’m willing to wear again, from an unexpected source: Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active2. Awful naming aside, it’s one of the strongest competitors to the Apple Watch I’ve seen.
Companies like Fossil and Misfit make wearables that run Google’s Wear OS, while FitBit and Withings churn out smartwatches focused on fitness or aesthetics. For the most part, smartwatches like the TicWatch look decent online, but are thick and chunky to wear in real life. They feel more like knock-off spy watches than accessories. Worse still, Wear OS devices are notorious for poor battery life and aren’t likely to get updates for the long haul — manufacturers don’t make money from keeping the software up to date, so they simply ignore it.
Samsung’s Active2, though, works with any device, looks great, and can make it almost two days on a single charge (not bad, given Apple targets 18 hours of battery life with its Series 5 watch).
What’s most surprising about the Active2 is an attention to detail that’s rare.
The difference starts with its appearance. I have wanted a circular smartwatch ever since the Moto 360 debuted and ultimately disappointed back in 2014; the shape looks natural for a watch. The Samsung’s Active2 is also slim enough to hide under a shirt or sweater, and small enough that it doesn’t seem like a smartwatch at all. The always-on display, especially with circular analog watch faces, helps it blend in even better.
What’s most surprising about the Active2 is an attention to detail that’s rare. The edges of its round display, for instance, can be used as a way to scroll through the UI—dragging your finger around the edge to the right scrolls down, and to the left scrolls up. While the bezel doesn’t physically move as it does in previous generations of Samsung smartwatches, it understands touch, and it’s more intuitive as a way to interact with a watch.
Many of the watch’s other features take advantage of the round display. The “My Day” watch face, for example, places reminders of the day’s meetings around the edges of the display, which is a helpful way to see what’s coming up for the entire day without jumping into an app.
Though not specifically targeted at fitness tracking like some of its competitors, the Active2 delivers on health features as well. While many watches require you to manually specify when a workout has begun, the Active2 automatically logs workouts, so that you don’t need to explicitly indicate you’re out for a run or cycle. After 10 minutes of activity, a little vibration notifies you the workout has started — which is so much better than fidgeting around with menus to get a workout kicked off.
Active2 has other thoughtful fitness prompts, clearly inspired by the Apple Watch, like a “heart” that fills up (similar to the Apple Watch’s rings) as you exercise and go about your day. But the Active2’s prompts go even further than Apple Watch’s prompts: Rather than pushing you to simply stand up hourly, the Active2 detects and shows inactivity, prompting a short walk or stretch.
I tested the Bluetooth version of the Active2, but I’m thinking of returning it for a refund so I can buy the LTE version, which would allow me to stream music, as well as get calls and notifications on the go.
What I most want from my smartwatch is the option to leave my phone at home entirely while I go for a run or cycle — or even just to escape scrolling through social media for a while — and Samsung might be the first brand to truly pull it off. The Apple Watch only allows Apple Music to sync offline. With the Active2, you can sync the device to Bluetooth headphones directly and use a Spotify integration to play play music offline while still doing GPS tracking on a run with the Strava watch app, finally free of wires.
I had worried that the Active2’s battery life wouldn’t be good enough. For the last two years, I’ve worn a Withings Steel HR, which only needs charging once every month. The Apple Watch I wore before that needed to be charged much more frequently — about once every two days — and I rarely remembered to charge it before the battery died.
Despite my fears, I was delighted by the Bluetooth Active2: Every night after a full day’s use — including workout tracking — I dropped it onto the magnetic charger with a solid 60% of battery life leftover.
Samsung didn’t get everything right with the Active2. One of the biggest pain points is its app store. Samsung has its own entire ecosystem of apps, if you’re noton a Samsung phone like the Note 10, you need to install three separate apps to even get started with the watch. That’s notincluding the Samsung Health app, which you’ll also need if you want health data on your phone andthe third-party syncing app for Google Fit if you want your data in there instead of Samsung’s silo.
Unlike the Apple Watch, Active2 allows third-party watch faces, but almost all of them are terrible. And its app store does a terrible job of showcasing watch faces that aren’t hideous. Instead, it shows a giant list of poor quality designs before you eventually find a good one buried at the bottom. That’s a shame, really, because the included watch faces are really good— they show off interesting ways to take advantage of the display, and I found myself wanting even more.
The Active2 has other minor quirks, like coming with always-on display disabled by default and burying the setting to turn it on yourself deep in a menu. Samsung did the same with the setting for the bezel-scrolling feature, which is also disabled out of the box.
Then there’s Bixby, Samsung’s voice assistant. Settings need to be disabled in multiple places to avoid accidentally triggering it on the watch. And Samsung wouldn’t let me use a different, more capable assistant, like Alexa or Google Assistant. I found myself even wishing Siriwas on this watch, something that I’ve never wanted any other time in the past — Bixby is that bad.
But, amongst all of these quirks and annoyances, the Active2 is surprisingly delightful. It delivers a good smartwatch alternative for anyone who is notdeeply invested in the Apple ecosystem (it works with an iPhone too, but has limited functionality due to Apple restrictions), at a fraction of the price — and with great aesthetics on top. I went in with low expectations, but was delighted to find myself enjoying wearing a smartwatch again.
If you’re in the market for a watch that isn’tthe Apple Watch, the Galaxy Active2 is what you should get. Samsung has delivered something for everyone, and the quality is at the level you’d actually wantto wear on your wrist, rather than hide it up to your sleeve.
