I was having issues with my Mi Band 4, it has been very flaky. For a month it would not connect to my Pixel 8a and then it started working again but a bit on and off. Anyway, I have got fed up with the unreliability of Xiaomi devices so I decided to look for something to replace it. I've also been wanting to get a few more features, but they usually come at a higher price. I spotted a first gen Pixel Watch practically new on Facebook Marketplace but ruled that out as apparently the battery life on those is atrocious. I also wanted a traditional looking round faced watch and so I ended up looking at Samsung smartwatches. I found a Galaxy Watch 4 in a Cash Converters for just 40 quid which seems to be in good condition, boxed with charger and a spare strap, a metal one, so I bought it.
Setup was a bit of a faff as it needed a bunch of Samsung apps installed to get full functionality, but it got there eventually. The one main annoyance after first setup was it kept asking to sign in to the Samsung account even after it was already setup, this seemed to be a known bug, but thankfully installing the latest update to the watch fixed it.
Charging is much nicer than on the Xiaomi Bands, instead of physical connectors, the Samsung uses a little circular wireless charging pad that you sit the watch on. Just make sure the Watch is placed correctly, it will show a progress bar when charging. From 5% to fully charged it took nearly two hours on the very first charge. When the battery gets very low it goes into watch-only mode. However I generally don't let it get too low, I usually charge it only once a day and usually for less than an hour, when I need to take it off to wash my hair, for example. That's not bad considering it has a lot more features than the old dumb Xiaomi.
I don't really need a lot of the Health stuff other than steps/miles - it's good to have a map at the end of a long walk, I used to do that manually with Google Maps Timeline. I don't use kilometres so I had to change that in settings. Open the Samsung Health app, tap the three dots or "More" icon, go to Settings, then select Units of measurement and change the distance to "Miles". I also find the sleep tracking useful too. I've found and installed some nice Watch faces from Google Play too.
I've switched it to use Google Assistant instead of Bixby, although Assistant seems to have been replaced by Google Gemini which is not so good. Some Wear apps like the Blood Pressure one require a Samsung phone to work.
I love being able to skip tracks on my music player using my watch, whether that's Poweramp on my phone or the music player on my laptop or desktop using KDE Connect. Since the phone can control whatever player is in use on KDE, it means my watch can control it too. And if you turn the dial of the watch, it controls the volume of whatever is playing.
Another neat trick is with the Google Camera app on the watch I can get my phone to take a photo whilst seeing roughly what the phone's camera is seeing on my phone, albeit squashed into a round display area. Another thing i only discovered after weeks of use, is the edge of the watch is a rotary dial like a 'proper' watch, and it flicks between functions the same as swiping.
Anyway all told, I'm happy with the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, it's great for the low price they are secondhand. I'm still getting major updates to Android Wear on it, and I'll probably use this watch until the battery wears out, then buy a newer version.
