Samsung Smartwatch Rose Gold Review: Cheaper and Trendiest

Samsung smartwatch rose gold has beautiful bezel, one and half day battery life, unlimited customisable watch faces.

Having adopted the smartwatch life for the past year, I quickly realized it was the smart features such as notifications and quick replies that I found the most useful. I used galaxy watch at the gym all the time. But, the fitness tracking aspects never really grew on me. When Samsung announced the Samsung smartwatch rose gold, I was curious to see if this new wearable aimed towards those with active lifestyles would change my mind.

ADVERTISEMENT

Putting the Samsung smartwatch rose gold on for the first time, you immediately feel how much lighter it is. Coming from a galaxy watch, I would be lying if I said I didn’t miss the rotating bezel. Besides being awesome for navigating, rose gold Samsung smartwatch provided a layer of protection for the screen when bumping into things.

With that being said, I think those with smaller wrists will appreciate the form factor for its comfort.

I’m even worried about times throughout the day. The slick understated appearance actually does a better job at blending in and looking the part when I’m at the gym. Being slimmer with rounded corners helps the active rose golf Samsung watch, not dig into the back of my hands as much while doing exercises like push ups or mountain climbing.

ADVERTISEMENT

Read: Raycon Earbuds Review: Heavy Bass Wireless Headphones

The bezel around the display is kind of big and it’s probably my least favorite thing about the design. A black wash face does do a decent job of masking the bezel though.

Plus it will save you some battery. The 1.1 inch display itself is bright and colorful and it’s actually only 0.1 mm smaller than the galaxy watch.

ADVERTISEMENT

Get Samsung smartwatch rose gold from Amazon

There is no speaker, so that means you cannot take calls on the Samsung watch r0se gold itself. It does have a micro speech to text and activating Bixby. The galaxy watch active rose gold only comes in Bluetooth, no LTE version as LTE would absolutely devour the battery.

With four gigabytes of built in storage, you can load up some of your favorite tracks or podcasts to enjoy when you don’t want to bring your phone along.

Samsung smartwatch rose gold

It only comes in one size. So if you were hoping for a larger version of the active, there isn’t one.

Samsung States up to 45 hours battery life, which is just under two days, although I’m sure this is possible with very conservative settings. Leaving everything on, the battery has typically lasted me one and a half days.

If you do any music streaming or work all tracking, which I do at the gym daily, it’s a single day battery. Samsung smartwatch rose gold does take around two hours to fully charge the watch from an almost dead battery. So plan accordingly if you’re looking to use the sleep tracking feature, if not, you can just charge it overnight.

What does Samsung Galaxy Watch Active rose gold offer in terms of fitness tracking?

Well, it’s auto workout detection. The watch can automatically detect six activities that will send to Samsung health without you lifting a finger. The predominant or step counter is a little slow to wake up, but once it does, it’s flawless. It’ll take about 10 steps before it kicks in and tax on those missing steps.

Samsung likely did this to prevent false tracking with everyday hand movements. I tried swinging my arm back and forth while standing still and yep, it logged a bunch of steps. The heart rate monitor is definitely improved over the galaxy watch and I have a feeling it has to do with how much larger the surface area of the sensor is.

Buy Samsung smartwatch rose gold from Amazon

Samsung smartwatch rose gold almost felt like one single beat of sweat on the older Samsung Galaxy watch censor, which totally threw off the sensor. Not the case with the Active Samsung rose gold.

rose gold Samsung smartwatch

It still is imperfect though. During more intense dynamic exercises, the heart rate monitor will still flat line, likely due to a build-up of sweat and the watch moving around a lot.

On the treadmill, elliptical or stair master, the heart rate monitor has been perfect with close to zero drops. The Samsung galaxy watch active can detect and log reps for weightlifting exercises.

Read: 10 Best Wireless Earbuds under $50

It does work, but I found it to be inconsistent. For exercises where the watch can’t track the movement, it’ll just start a timer and estimate how many calories you’re burning.

If you lift weights and looking for a way to track and log your custom workouts on the watch, I highly recommend an app called GymRun. It is paid, but totally worth it as it’s so convenient having your exercises, sets reps and rest time all on your wristwatch Samsung.

I would love to see Samsung include this as a default feature on the watch.

Although, I’m not an avid runner, for those of you who are, the samsung smartwatch rose gold has built in GPS to map and keep track of your stats.

Location lock on is fairly quick, and to get the most accurate tracking, I highly suggest turning on high accuracy under location settings. If you’re looking to use the Samsung galaxy watch active to track stairs climbed, it can do that just fine as long as the stairs you’re climbing are more than 17 steps or 10 feet.

Buy Samsung smartwatch rose gold from Amazon

It registers every single step climbed at my gym, but when I go up the stairs from my basement, which is only 12 steps, it doesn’t.

We watched the watch in the bed for the past couple of weeks. It has actually been a really good experience thanks to how light the Active watch is.

The watch will track four stages of your sleep, and it’s similar to the results I was getting on the previous galaxy watch. On several nights, it wasn’t that I was awake in the middle of the night. It’s possibly a glitch or maybe I was tossing and turning a lot. It even tracks naps, but on some occasions, logged sleep when I was just lying on the couch watching TV.

All of this information that the rose gold watch active collects, get sync to Samsung health which serves as a hub for your health data.

Talking to others, you either love it or hate it. It does the job for me. Though, I like data for individual workout sessions to be easier to get to.

How to measure blood pressure with Galaxy watch active?

Well, I did test out the blood pressure monitor. It requires a third party app called My BP lab, as well as signing up for a study.

galaxy watch active rose gold

You need to obtain a baseline measurement from a real blood pressure cuff to get actual readings from the watch. Once everything is set up, the watch did match to get readings that were very close to an actual cuff, so that’s impressive.

Keep in mind you don’t even need the watch as the heart rate monitor on recent Samsung phones will work too.

Read: Custom Fit iPhone Headphones with Active Noise Cancellation

The Samsung smartwatch rose gold did fail to get a reading multiple times, so it looks like it needs some refining.

The software is clearly designed for the rotating bezel. So when you remove that hardware feature, navigating through everything was a little more tedious.

The sheer number of widgets that you can enable combined with each notification being its own page means a lot of swipes. I did get used to swipe for navigating very quickly, so it’s perfectly fine.

I was pleasantly surprised to see one UI make its way onto the Galaxy watch active is more been an aesthetic change more than anything, but I like how things look.

Buy Samsung smartwatch rose gold from Amazon

It’s refined and matches well with what Samsung is doing on their smartphones. However, the wakeup justice sometimes doesn’t want to work. Forcing me to actually tap the screen or flip my wrist to wake it up.

Greatest strength of Samsung watch lineup is the massive amount of customizable watch faces. It’s a great way to make the watch your own.

There are plenty samsung smartwatch rose gold watch faces to choose from, and I mean that from paid to free. There’s something for every mood or situation.

galaxy watch active rose gold

The biggest knock on Samsung watch software is the lack of third party apps. I’ll need to check out a Google Wear OS watch to see what the entire app is about.

But Samsung does do a good job of giving you the basic apps you’ll likely use on the watch.

Google maps app was something I did want, but I’ve been using something called navigation pro that gets the job done.

In terms of music streaming, Spotify and Title, both have dedicated watch apps with the ability to download music for offline listening.

Despite being labeled Active, the Galaxy Watch Active Rose Gold actually does the smart features well.

Notifications show up in a timely manner on both my pixel 3 and S10 Plus, I can reply using speech to text T9 keyboard with emojis or the handwriting keyboard, which you have to enable settings for some odd reason.

Using it with the STM plus enables you to view a message and call history for Samsung based apps like messaging, email, and phone as they have dedicated apps on the watch.

Samsung Watch apps like voice memo and reminders will also sync seamlessly to the SDM plus whereas with the Pixel 3, it’s isolated to the watch.

If you’re using a non-Samsung phone, I still think it’s a good fit since receiving notifications and quick replies will likely be the primary use anyways. Plus you still get access to the galaxy app store.

Like I mentioned earlier, since there’s no speaker on the watch itself, when you receive a call, you can accept the call from the galaxy active watch, but it will prompt you to take the call on your phone.

I tried pinning the galaxy buds to the wash to see if that could be a work around, but it still wouldn’t let me take the call on the watch itself.

I had to pick up the phone to have a conversation. The Samsung smartwatch rose gold is not meant to be an upgrade from the galaxy watch, but a cheaper option for active minded individuals looking for a slim down design.

I personally prefer the 42 mm galaxy watch for the ability to take calls directly on the watch and the rotating bezel for navigation.

But, you could easily live with the cheaper Samsung watch. It does the smartwatch features well, and for most the fitness features, although far from perfect, may just be the push needed for a healthier lifestyle.

Buy Samsung smartwatch rose gold from Amazon