Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra2 review

One UI Watch 9 + Wear OS 7

The Galaxy Watch Ultra2 runs on the latest Wear OS 7-based One UI Watch 9 software. Visually and navigation-wise, the OS is nearly identical to the older version 8, which in turn introduced the new UI and visual refinements. We suggest that you check out the software section of our Galaxy Watch8 Classic review where we explore all the changes brought about by One UI Watch 8 in depth.

For the first time, Samsung officially announces how many updates Galaxy Watch Ultra2 and Watch9 owners should expect. The company pledges 5 years of major OS upgrades, which is quite generous in the world of wearables.

Home screen • Quick toggles • Recent apps • App drawer

The integration of the Now Bar and Gemini AI directly into the watch to do simple tasks like start a timer, add a calendar meeting or ask for directions happened with the previous One UI Watch generation. This one introduces the raise-to-talk function. Simply raise your wrist and ask Gemini to do something. Unfortunately, in our experience, the feature was hit or miss. Most times, Gemini didn't respond.

Settings menu and widgets

The Galaxy Wearable app for Android, however, is a different story. The whole app has been revamped, just like the Samsung Health app, covered in the next section. The new design is cleaner, more interactive, and with nicer animations. Some of them maybe unnecessary, but nice-looking nonetheless.

Galaxy Wearable app

You get three main tabs in a small navigation bar at the bottom. Watch faces get their own tab, while the watch settings occupy the third tab. The middle tab is a combination of both and provides quick access to the most common settings.

Watch settings

The rest of the new features are mostly health and fitness-related. After all, the Ultra2 is aimed at adventure-seekers, so let's get into it.

Samsung health and fitness tracking

With One UI Watch 9, Samsung is making the first step of transitioning from a reactive to a preventive philosophy and approach toward Samsung Health. By taking all vital measurements into account, Samsung Health analyzes all the data captured by the Ultra2's sensors, and when something is meaningfully off baseline, you will be notified to take action.

Speaking of Samsung Health, the Android app companion is fully revamped and is in line with the Galaxy Wearable app. Each category gets its own tab, while the home tab is fully customizable with small and large widgets of all the data you usually track or prefer to see first.

Samsung Health

Back to the new health-related features, in addition to the vascular load, the app can now give you a summarized score of your overall heart health. It takes into account several measurements - 7-day sleep time average, moderate to vigorous physical activity average, BMI and vascular load. BMI, of course, will always be off for individuals carrying above-average muscle mass, but that's a different topic, and it doesn't concern the vast majority of the population anyway.

Similar to heart health, the app tracks your fitness index as well. It collects data from your walking or running activity and your body composition, with the latter still being mostly a guesstimation. Even if you think it should at least be good for relative measurements on yourself, you have to remember the electrical impedance method will produce wide deviations depending on when and what you ate before measuring, as well as on how hydrated you are at the moment of measurement.

Vitals data

Kudos to Samsung for giving you suggestions and data based on your own baseline. You need to wear your watch constantly for a full week, including during sleep, to collect all your vital data. This data is then used to give you guidance during workouts, which brings us to two of the highlight features this year - improved Trail Running and Diving data.

Samsung also serves you data in a tidier way and provides a little bit of extra data during your sleep, for example. We don't know how accurate it is since we haven't had the chance to pit the Ultra2 against professional-grade equipment.

Sleep data

We also noticed that the watch now serves VO2 max data, but we doubt it's very accurate since it requires specific equipment and exercise scenario to measure properly. Here's a quick bike ride with location tracking as an example.

Bike ride data

The watch also gives suggestions for appropriate watch faces that may fit your lifestyle. After our first bike ride, the Galaxy Ultra2 suggested the following watch face.

Watch face suggestions based on activity

Trail Running now includes more detailed data such as trail impact and pace suggestions based on that. It also provides real-time hydration guidance and nutritional alerts based on data collected by the sweat loss feature. By measuring sweat loss relative to bodyweight, the watch provides guidance on when and how much to hydrate during your run.

Samsung has turned the Galaxy Watch Ultra2 into a full-fledged diving monitor in partnership with Mares. There's also an Auto Dive feature that automatically detects when you submerge the watch into the water and starts showing real-time depth and water temperature. It also provides information such as ascent rate and safe dive time limits in real-time. The feature isn't available at launch but will be official by the end of this year. The complete set of diving features will also require a small monthly subscription but no long term obligations.

Auto dive feature

Since we don't have any divers in the office, we were only able to try it out in a regular pool and the auto dive feature works flawlessly. Depth and water temperature are measured instantly upon submergence.