Samsung Galaxy Watch4 buyer's guide: How to choose the right Android smartwatch

Should you buy it? Yes, but also no

The Galaxy Watch4 is one of the best smartwatches around, thanks to a combination of top-notch hardware and excellent software. If you're a first-time buyer, the Watch4 is an easy choice, but what if you want to upgrade from an existing watch? Are the benefits of the latest and greatest software worth trading your current device for?

Unless you use an Apple Watch or dedicated fitness tracker, most people have one of two products: An older Wear OS 2.3 device or a Samsung Galaxy Watch running Tizen. The pros and cons of upgrading are different depending on which camp you find yourself in, so let's cover them one by one.

Galaxy Watch4 vs. other Wear OS watches

The Watch4 offers great hardware, with 1.5GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and the Exynos W920, along with every fitness sensor you can imagine. But the real advantage is its software. Wear OS 3 might be buried beneath Samsung's software skin — which isn't a bad thing depending on who you ask — but that isn't enough to mask the benefits that come from Google's latest platform update.

Naturally, Wear OS 3 is faster and has more features than 2.3, but more important is the consistency and stability. Wear OS has always been plagued by bugs and quirks, and while some of them can be explained away by the poor chipsets inflicted on us by Qualcomm, many of them are down to the OS itself. Even something as basic as maintaining a Bluetooth connection to your phone could be unreliable. My Galaxy Watch4 exhibits none of these issues.

I should probably address the elephant in the room at this point. Why am I spending so much time comparing Wear OS 3 to Wear OS 2.3? After all, this won't be an issue once older watches get updated. Well, there lies the rub. Most existing Wear OS smartwatches won't get an update, and the few that are could be waiting until at least the second half of 2022.

As for the devices that won't get Wear OS 3, we don't know what the future holds for them. Existing features should continue to work, and Google did bring its YouTube Music app to the older version of Wear OS. As for security patches and bug fixes, we don't know.

So, if you're using an older watch like a Fossil Gen 5 or even a Huawei Watch 2, should you upgrade to the Galaxy Watch4? Yes, you should, even though it's been slathered in One UI sauce, and its ECG sensor won't work unless you're using a Samsung phone.

Sure, you could get something like a Fossil Gen 6 or a Ticwatch Pro 3, which has competitive hardware, but doing so would leave you stuck on Wear OS 2.3 for at least a year, and you shouldn't buy something based on the promise of what it might do one day. You should buy something based on what it can do now, and the improvements made in Wear 3.0 are significant enough to make the Watch4 win out over everything else. That same argument can be used against the Watch4 itself, too, as Google Assistant isn't working yet, but is expected to come in an update further down the road. If having Assistant is important enough to you, that might push you to another option, but let's be honest — how often do you really need to access Assistant on your wrist?

Watch4 vs. its predecessors

If you have an older Tizen-powered Galaxy Watch, the question of whether you should upgrade is much easier to answer. While older Galaxy Watches still feel fast thanks to their Exynos chipsets, the Watch4 increases the gap over its Snapdragon counterparts, making it the smoothest smartwatch I've ever used.

Once again, the software will be the deciding factor here, even though One UI on top of Wear OS looks and feels almost identical to One UI on Tizen. Look a bit closer, though, and the improvements become more apparent. The Galaxy Watch4 swaps the Galaxy Store for the Play Store, and that alone could be enough to make you upgrade.

The Play Store has a much larger catalog of apps and watch faces, and more importantly, allows you to use Google services, something sorely lacking on Tizen devices. I can't tell you how much I missed having Google Keep, Pay, and Maps on my wrist on my Active2. The only downside here is that watch faces purchased on the Galaxy Store won't be available to you anymore, but that's a small price to pay.

If those improvements aren't enough for you to get rid of your current Galaxy Watch, that's fine as well. Unlike older Wear OS hardware, we know what software support you should expect from Samsung. You probably won't get any new software features, but you will continue to get software support for three years after your watch was released, so security updates and bug fixes will continue as before. That means my old Active2 is good until September 2022, and the Galaxy Watch3 will be supported until August 2023.

The Watch4's pricing is worth considering as well. While it launched at a slightly higher price than the Fossil Gen 6, Samsung loves to discount products even when they're only a month or two old, and we've already seen $50 discounts across all of the Watch4 models.

So, should you upgrade to the Galaxy Watch4 if you're using an older Galaxy Watch? Depending on your circumstances, yes. If you were already planning to upgrade, I think you should pick the Watch4 over everything else. If you're happy with your older Wear OS device, I'd say stick with it and see what happens next year as more Wear OS 3 watches are released, and newer models are updated. And if you have a Galaxy Watch3, then there's no real reason to upgrade until it starts to fail or reaches the end of its support window. If you do upgrade, though, I can say with certainty that you'll be happy with the Watch4. I know I am.

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