Samsung Unpacked 2020: Hands and Heads On with Wearables
Techsponential’s Samsung Unpacked coverage includes three reports:
This report on Samsung’s Wearables
Bottom Line
Samsung’s wearables are competitive and give the company ways to monetize its smartphone installed base, even if consumers are not ready to upgrade their phones yet. The Galaxy Buds Live are designed for consumers who don’t want wireless earbuds pressing into their ear canal. The Galaxy Watch3 builds on Samsung’s superb dial-based interface and adds more health monitoring abilities, which matches well with the current environment.
Galaxy Buds Live
On paper, the Galaxy Buds Live look unbeatable: active noise cancellation, always listening assistant, sound tuned by AKG, six hours of battery life with ANC on, lots of microphones, a unique design ID, wireless charging, and a price point of just $170. In practice, Samsung’s Galaxy Buds Live will indeed be perfect for some consumers; others will be better off with more traditional in-ear wireless earbuds – perhaps Samsung’s own Galaxy Buds+, which remain on the market.
The shiny bean-shaped Galaxy Buds Live look different from anything else on the market, but that is only part of what makes the design unique. The Galaxy Buds Live’s shape allows them to sit fully outside the ear canal (unlike most earbuds including Samsung’s Galaxy Buds and Apple AirPods Pro) without hanging off the ear (unlike Apple’s AirPods). Many people will find this design extremely comfortable. It also allows outside sound to enter the ear without an artificial “ambience” mode, so it is safer to use while jogging or cycling or while trying to squeeze in a bit of work from home before the baby wakes up crying.
However, the design does involve tradeoffs: the Galaxy Buds Live offer good sound quality, but not great. Bass suffers the most; raising the bass in the app helps somewhat. ANC is also weakened by the lack of a seal with your ears. You can tell the difference between “on” and “off,” but at no time does it block out much sound. The sound that is blocked is only the lowest frequencies. I couldn’t test on airplanes or subways during the pandemic, but when simulating noise in my office, the passive seal of Galaxy Buds+ did a better job of sound dampening than the Galaxy Buds Live’s active noise technology. Apple’s AirPods Pro were markedly better than either Samsung offering in this respect – though at a much higher price point ($250).
The microphones sound a bit tinny in a quiet environment, but Samsung has done some magic with noise cancellation on the microphones, so your callers will still be able to hear you if there is background noise. Samsung includes an always-listening mode for Bixby, but if you want to use Google’s Assistant, you’ll want to leave that off and save battery life. Leaving Bixby off and ANC on was my preferred way of listening; Samsung specifies battery life in that scenario at six hours. My listening session were not quite that long, so I never came close to running out of power. Popping the earbuds into the case for just five minutes adds an hour of listening time, and the glossy, compact case can be powered by USB-C or wirelessly.
My experience with the Galaxy Buds Live left me hoping that Samsung adds ANC to the next version of the Galaxy Buds+, whose in-the-ear-canal design should allow ANC to cancel out more noise while providing a fuller, more detailed sound. However, Samsung should definitely find an audience for the Galaxy Buds Live: they look great, they perform well, and they will be uniquely comfortable for many people – especially those who won’t wear regular earbuds because they find things lodged in their ears unpleasant.
Galaxy Watch3
It took a while, but smartwatches are becoming a mature category: it is now relatively clear what consumers use them for, and what the formula for creating a good smartwatch looks like. Smartwatches are primarily used as smartphone companions with rich notifications, fitness tracking, and ever-more-capable health monitoring. Tight integration with the phone’s operating system is required, giving the OS platform owners leverage over the ecosystem of devices around them. Smartwatches are also fashion objects that tell time, which limits how much room within the case is available for batteries. Customized silicon is needed to make the most of that tiny battery.
Apple has complete control over iOS and develops its own silicon, and the resulting Apple Watch is the best-selling watch of any kind, smart or otherwise. Google, however, has struggled in wearables, giving Samsung room to establish its smartwatches as the best option for any Android user, not just those with Samsung phones.
Samsung has a long history with smartwatches, stretching back all the way to 2013 – two full years before Apple entered the market. Over that span of time, Samsung gave up on Google’s Android Wear platform, choosing Tizen instead. Samsung then hit upon a user interface design that is simpler and easier to use than any other smartwatch. The rotating bezel makes it quick to move through options while seeing everything on the screen, and then just touch or swipe on the screen to complete an action. This mechanical dial does add a millimeter to the watch’s height, but when Samsung tried replacing it with a touch sensitive area instead on the Galaxy Watch Active2, the user experience suffered. For the Galaxy Watch3, Samsung tried a compromise: keep the physical rotating bezel from the original Galaxy Watch (there was no Galaxy Watch2), while shrinking the battery a bit to try to get the watch’s size down a bit.
The good news is that the smaller battery and Samsung Exynos 9110 processor combine for a day and a half of runtime with the big, bright 1.4” AMOLED display always on. That is enough for all-day use, plus sleep tracking, before needing a recharge. The bad news is that the Galaxy Watch3 is still a physically large watch, in either 41mm or 45mm version. The 45mm stainless steel version Samsung sent me is the one I would choose – I have large wrists, and the watch looks proportional. It’s a big watch, but it’s not comically oversized. However, like many large watches (mechanical or smart), the Watch3 is still too thick to wear under many of my long sleeve shirts with cuffs. Admittedly, this is not an issue at the moment – my pandemic attire tends to be no more formal than a T-shirt.
The ring-based interface it much easier to navigate through notifications and apps than Google’s Android Wear or Apple’s WatchOS. The Galaxy Watch3 can be used to make or receive phone calls via LTE or WiFi, play music from your collection or streaming from Spotify, or make contactless payments using Samsung Pay. Unfortunately, third party apps are still somewhat sparse on Tizen. Apple Watch has a much deeper selection of first-party app extensions; if you want to control your Sonos speakers or Hue lights, you’ll need to spend $3 each on Tizen apps from independent developers. Not only are many of these clearly amateur efforts, the user needs to invoke them; on Apple Watch, the Sonos controls pop up automatically when the system is in use. And, of course, Dark Sky is now exclusive to Apple on phones and smartwatches alike.
One area where Samsung’s Tizen clearly beats Apple’s ecosystem is watch faces. Apple limits you to a couple dozen customizable options. Samsung starts with its own customizable designs, plus a mode that matches colors to your outfit. Then third party developers take over, with thousands of other watch face options available for download in Samsung’s store. There are also apps like Facer, which I used to turn my watch into a Donkey Kong homage one day, and sporting Aardman-style animatronic sheep the next. You can also easily swap Samsung’s leather bands with any standard 22mm alternative.
I worried that the bulk of the watch would make it uncomfortable for sleep tracking, but it wasn’t. Samsung has beefed up the granularity of the sleep data the Galaxy Watch3 gathers, which is then attractively displayed in the Samsung Health app on your phone. Samsung also continues to improve fitness and sports activity tracking, including some coaching suggestions in certain activities. Samsung’s emphasis is more on real workouts rather than the activity ring that Apple uses as a proxy for general fitness, but the Galaxy Watch3 still makes a superb nag, tracking steps and reminding me multiple times that I was overly sedentary writing this report.
The most exciting area in wearables is health management, and Samsung is pushing the envelope. The company is waiting for FDA approval of its blood pressure monitoring capability, the first of its kind on a general-purpose smartwatch. (Omron has a HeartGuide blood pressure monitor that looks like a watch, but it’s not really in the same category.) The Galaxy Watch3 monitors heart rate, can do single-point ECG, and can track hard falls – a key cause of disability among seniors. Samsung has also added SpO2 and VO2 Max monitoring, which it intended for fitness tracking, not medical monitoring. Still, it can be used for tracking pulse oxidation, which could be useful for monitoring potential Covid-19 symptoms. Samsung’s lawyers, concerned with legal liability, are almost certainly behind the company’s statement that, “the Galaxy Watch3 is not a medical device.” Perhaps not, but it is getting awfully close. If Samsung can add non-invasive glucose monitoring in the future, that feature alone would make a Galaxy Watch a mandatory purchase for millions of people.
As it is, Samsung has a clear winner with the Galaxy Watch3. It is a big, attractive smartwatch with a superb user interface, endless watch faces, and reasonable performance and battery life. Pricing is on the premium side, but so is the product. The Galaxy Watch3 can be a workout companion, and serve as way to monitor more health markers than any other watch on the market today, with more features just awaiting FDA approval in the U.S.
To discuss the implications of this report on your business, product, or investment strategies, contact Avi at avi@techsponential.com or +1 (201) 677-8284.
Additional Photos
