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Samsung S25/ S25 Ultra

aggie99 said:
It is a fantastic watch. I prefer Apple Watch Ultra software but the Galaxy Watch Ultra is a better looking watch in my opinion and battery life much better
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mjschabow said:
Dang, the Galaxy Ultra has even better battery than the AW Ultra?
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aggie99 said:
In my usage, yes it does. I don't have either of them activated over LTE though so not sure how much that would affect them if you go that route.
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I won’t derail this thread (too much) with my experience but saw these comments and wanted to briefly chime in as I didn’t find a dedicated thread for the watch elsewhere.

I just picked up a Galaxy Watch Ultra to test drive (paired to a Pixel 9 Pro Fold) against my Apple Watch Ultra 2 (paired with a 15 Pro Max). Yup, I’m gonna be the guy wearing a watch on each wrist for the near future. 😂

I’ll probably make a separate thread just to share my detailed review of the Watch Ultra later but very early impression:

  1. Attractive styling. I was initially critical of the circle in a squircle design but it looks better in person. I picked up the silver titanium with the white band (matches my Apple Watch Ultra. Going forward, will refer to them as GW or AW for simplicity)
  2. It is a chunky big boy though compared to the AW. Body is wider and thicker.
  3. Screen is bright and crisp. Watch faces are OK but complication choices are quite limited.
  4. Choice of buttons and limited options for their use is a big miss. The orange button can only be used for a few things and only for Samsung workouts—can’t be changed to Google’s equivalent. Same goes for the bottom button. Not having a rotating crown is a huge miss, especially since this Watch doesn’t have Samsung’s best hardware navigation option, the rotating bezel.
  5. Battery life over first two days has been better on my Apple Watch Ultra, which also has LTE activated. Not a huge difference but my AW was at 71% while GW was at 63% this evening. And the AW has been doing more work since I really don’t get the same amount of notifications on the GW. I did run the same workout tracking simultaneously on both watches.
  6. There isn’t app parity between the two ecosystems. A bunch of apps I use on the AW aren’t available for Wear OS, even though many do have Android versions. And when they do exist, they often don’t have feature parity. For instance, Pocket Cast—one of the biggest cross platform podcast apps, doesn’t have auto-download to the watch on Wear OS, has to be done manually. This alone might be a deal breaker as I use this feature daily on my AW. I have submitted feedback to the developer.
  7. The UI and navigation is kinda clunky, for lack of a more precise description. Again, having a digital crown would help a lot. Also, not having an option for an alphabetical app drawer, or at least labeled apps is a big miss. I don’t know what a lot of the apps are just by their icon.
Those are some things that jumped out at me during my initial use. I’ll be putting it through its paces for the next few weeks and hopefully will share my thoughts in greater detail in another appropriate thread.

Back to your regular S25 programming. 😄
 
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tbayrgs said:
I won’t derail this thread (too much) with my experience but saw these comments and wanted to briefly chime in as I didn’t find a dedicated thread for the watch elsewhere.

I just picked up a Galaxy Watch Ultra to test drive (paired to a Pixel 9 Pro Fold) against my Apple Watch Ultra 2 (paired with a 15 Pro Max). Yup, I’m gonna be the guy wearing a watch on each wrist for the near future. 😂

I’ll probably make a separate thread just to share my detailed review of the Watch Ultra later but very early impression:

  1. Attractive styling. I was initially critical of the circle in a squircle design but it looks better in person. I picked up the silver titanium with the white band (matches my Apple Watch Ultra. Going forward, will refer to them as GW or AW for simplicity)
  2. It is a chunky big boy though compared to the AW. Body is wider and thicker.
  3. Screen is bright and crisp. Watch faces are OK but complication choices are quite limited.
  4. Choice of buttons and limited options for their use is a big miss. The orange button can only be used for a few things and only for Samsung workouts—can’t be changed to Google’s equivalent. Same goes for the bottom button. Not having a rotating crown is a huge miss, especially since this Watch doesn’t have Samsung’s best hardware navigation option, the rotating bezel.
  5. Battery life over first two days has been better on my Apple Watch Ultra, which also has LTE activated. Not a huge difference but my AW was at 71% while GW was at 63% this evening. And the AW has been doing more work since I really don’t get the same amount of notifications on the GW. I did run the same workout tracking simultaneously on both watches.
  6. There isn’t app parity between the two ecosystems. A bunch of apps I use on the AW aren’t available for Wear OS, even though many do have Android versions. And when they do exist, they often don’t have feature parity. For instance, Pocket Cast—one of the biggest cross platform podcast apps, doesn’t have auto-download to the watch on Wear OS, has to be done manually. This alone might be a deal breaker as I use this feature daily on my AW. I have submitted feedback to the developer.
  7. The UI and navigation is kinda clunky, for lack of a more precise description. Again, having a digital crown would help a lot. Also, not having an option for an alphabetical app drawer, or at least labeled apps is a big miss. I don’t know what a lot of the apps are just by their icon.
Those are some things that jumped out at me during my initial use. I’ll be putting it through its paces for the next few weeks and hopefully will share my thoughts in greater detail in another appropriate thread.

Back to your regular S25 programming. 😄
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Appreciate the thoughts. What's interesting reading thoughts like this is that I've gone to realize that I don't use my watch like a lot of people do. I wear mine to tell time, see how many steps I have, and check notifications, which I limit to only a few apps. I could probably go without one but hey, scoring an open box Classic 6 for $170 is a small investment.
 
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mjschabow said:
Appreciate the thoughts. What's interesting reading thoughts like this is that I've gone to realize that I don't use my watch like a lot of people do. I wear mine to tell time, see how many steps I have, and check notifications, which I limit to only a few apps. I could probably go without one but hey, scoring an open box Classic 6 for $170 is a small investment.
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Yeah, I've spoken about it numerous times over the years on other threads but I'm a pretty heavy user of my watch so anything I try other than my Apple Watch Ultra has a lot to live up to. I don't expect anything to be as fully featured because let's be honest, the smart watch ecosystems outside of Apple don't have nearly the same user base, both in size and willingness to spend money or developer support.

And before anyone chimes in with how more fully featured the Garmin fitness watches are when it comes to fitness, I won't disagree. But I'm also don't need that extreme level of fitness tracking. What Apple and hopefully Google offers, along with the offerings of third party apps and software is more than I need. It's all the other 'smart' functionality that can't be matched and what I'm more interested in. We'll see how it all shakes out over the next few weeks.
 
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Alright. Gave YouTube Music a try for a week and liked it. Going to give Spotify a try for a week now and decide if I want to switch to either of them over Apple Music.

YouTube has some nice advantages but the App is still kind of a mess. And I wish it had more compatibility with devices like Roku and Alexa. I like that Spotify has all that.

Apple Music is probably still my favorite interface but if it has Google Assistant limitations, that is kind of a deal breaker. Plus I like how I can save Spotify playlists and tuck it away in a folder.
 
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mjschabow said:
Alright. Gave YouTube Music a try for a week and liked it. Going to give Spotify a try for a week now and decide if I want to switch to either of them over Apple Music.

YouTube has some nice advantages but the App is still kind of a mess. And I wish it had more compatibility with devices like Roku and Alexa. I like that Spotify has all that.

Apple Music is probably still my favorite interface but if it has Google Assistant limitations, that is kind of a deal breaker. Plus I like how I can save Spotify playlists and tuck it away in a folder.
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tbh I've always found spotify easiest for the way I like to find and play music.... but I have youtube premium with free yt music and I just can't bring myself to waste that ;-)

I never got on with apple music for some reason, even on the iphone
 
keithop said:
tbh I've always found spotify easiest for the way I like to find and play music.... but I have youtube premium with free yt music and I just can't bring myself to waste that ;-)

I never got on with apple music for some reason, even on the iphone
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Yeah the appeal to me about Apple Music was always that I was on iPhone so it's just so baked into the software. Spotify seems really good. A little bit more clunky than I'm used to, and I think YouTube music is really the one that's going to get better throughout time. Probably my favorite music app ever was Google Play Music. Miss that one!
 
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mjschabow said:
Yeah the appeal to me about Apple Music was always that I was on iPhone so it's just so baked into the software. Spotify seems really good. A little bit more clunky than I'm used to, and I think YouTube music is really the one that's going to get better throughout time. Probably my favorite music app ever was Google Play Music. Miss that one!
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I have the Apple Music family plan. I like Apple Music but i am open to trying something different as well.
Curious can you export/import the playlists from AM to Spotify or YouTube music?
 
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jamezr said:
I have the Apple Music family plan. I like Apple Music but i am open to trying something different as well.
Curious can you export/import the playlists from AM to Spotify or YouTube music?
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I actually found this site on a Reddit thread, and it works really well for Apple Music to Spotify. It's free which is nice!

Playlists.cloud

Manage and sync your music playlists from different sources.
playlists.cloud playlists.cloud
 
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jamezr said:
Thanks!
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You bet! After all the sinking was done, probably took me less than 20 minutes to get all the playlists sent over. The naming of the playlists looks a little jacked up at first on Spotify but you can always edit them.
 
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noobinator said:
Lol point taken. I guess I'm cheap with certain things. Phone budget, there are no limits. Music streaming, gimmie the cheapest that gets the job done adequately.
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This is coming from a guy that will not give $2 to take money out from another ATM machine LOL but will spend thousands on about everything else haha
 
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mjschabow said:
Damn the price of eggs are expensive. Hmmm should I get a Samsung tablet too?
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Eggs are cheap at our house.....
We have 6 laying hens. We usually get about 6 to 8 a day

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mjschabow said:
After a week, Battery life is now a beast for me. Until there are major advances in battery technology, all I ask is for 7-8 hour SOT, and I'm currently on pace to get more than 8.
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Wow that’s really a beast!
I get with my 15 PM on iOS 18.3.1 only 4-5 hrs of SOT🙁
 
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