Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 // Sports & Fitness First Run & Tests
Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2
Hey folks, Ray at DCRAINMAKER.com here, today I’ve got the new Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 or, maybe it’s just Active Watch 2, Active, Active……it’s a lot of words so I’m just going to go with Active 2, because that’s what everyone’s really gonna call it. And I’m gonna put it through its paces from a sports/fitness kind of technology standpoint.
And not so much from like a general usage standpoint. There are endless videos out there on YouTube that’ll cover that. I’m gonna talk about sports..that’s what I do! I’m going to talk about things like is the new heart rate sensor better? Is GPS improved? Are the UI, are all the apps better from sports and fitness standpoint? Has anything changed there? It’s only been like six or seven months since the last version came out.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 Review
So I’m gonna talk all about that. But before I do that I want to briefly touch on the digital bezel, mostly because I’m seeing a lot of people do it wrong. Now the catch is a lot of people don’t realize it’s actually not enable by default. So I’m going to show you how to enable that really quick. Simply swipe down first, click the little Settings icon there. Go down to advanced. And then within advanced you will see ‘Touch “Bezel”.
In my case I’ve turned on. Now obviously I could turn it off right there, and that’s really how you get that touch bezel working. I think for the most part it works fairly well actually better than I thought it would, and a heck of a lot better once you turn it on than it did without it on.
Now let’s go ahead and talk about that new optical heart rate sensor.This is probably the biggest, probably this is the biggest exterior or difference between these two watches from a hardware standpoint because if you look from the top down they look virtually identical and when you turn them on here you’ll notice they’re still pretty similar in terms of like display brightness and stuff like that obviously have different watch faces on them right now but it’s when you turn them over that things are holy cow different and the case here the sensor looks dramatically different they’ve consolidated the LEDs down into kind of a single pot in the middle there versus on this side here you had four LEDs there and you remember in the past the accuracy of the active one was not super hot my super hot I mean it was basically dumpster fire status they improved GPS and the active watch compared to past samsung watches but not so much the heart rate sensor it was kind of useless now if you let me compare this to the Apple watch other series four or series five because the optical heart rate sensors are between the two of them you’ll notice that they’re pretty darn similar so you know is why I mean maybe that they’re doing this because there’s reasons from ECG standpoint the base particular designs need to be similar but given that other ECG watches like the Withings watch don’t look anything like that yeah there’s probably a more simplistic explanation for that still it’ll be used to see what not this proves itself as more accurate once it’s out on the road as in the case of the Apple watch and generally speaking it is a very accurate off of a heart rate sensor though there are some courses series 5 but overall though it’s definitely a better design than what Samsung seemed to have in the past now before we get to that though let’s briefly talk about some of the different health widgets so things that are accessible on the watch itself so you can go ahead and track like activities and stuff like that so access those make sure your display is on simply swipe to the right right there and you can go ahead and see kind of your activity overview for the day you can tap that and you can look at activity you look at workout in my case even though I’ve already done my run it won’t show up here because I’ve used endomondo so I won’t see that workout time and there unfortunately you can see if I move hourly goals are listed there that seems like it might be undercutting things a little bit but it is what it is.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2
It’s sort of the overview for the week itself I can go ahead them back out and swipe to the right and this is where we go ahead and start an activity and I can add activities kind of this little Quick Start menu there this is my heartrate my current heart rate in this case it’s trying to search for it which is two blinking obviously it’s on the table so it’s probably not succeed there I can measure it right there and I can look at the min and Max values of my heart rate – over the course of the week so I think through here kind of an on sport thing about the weather though today it was very much a sport thing I’ve got my calendar and amando widget is on there so I can see my last run right there and quick short of workout to sleep functionality in this case this is actually relatively close to what my actual sleep time was last night I woke up a little bit later that made about 15-20 minutes but I believe that’s actually when the watch had died you know when I went to bed is still 22 hours of battery life left when I woke up some you know 4 hours later it was dead so that’s kind of a bit of a bummer so there’s out there and I can add widgets into this role here again kind of all the same widgets that you have seen in the past a lot of breakouts for sport and fitness ones or more kind of Fitness ones there for example you can add floors climbed your exercise for the day food health summary leaderboard a multi workout there’s caffeine as well in there I mean lots and lots of options okay before we head outside
I just want to give you a quick cautionary note on all the Trish ins and all the times you have to approve something on this launch in order to actually use it from a sport and fitness standpoint this morning before my run I counted no less than five times that I had approved commissions for this watch to access GPS to access GPS again to access my location yet again to go ahead and access my heart rate sensors and to access my data on samsung health which is kind of nut it’s just way too many layers in most of the time it’s very wavy down the menus says if you wear that and don’t talk before you press the start button on your workout that you actually do have a GPS you do have heart rate all that kind of stuff with that warning out of the way let’s go for a run okay so here we are outside it’s all the things you don’t want it to go for run it’s windy it’s cold it’s raining sweat it’s just not ideal but I got four watches with me here I’ve got the actor to right there on this wrist over here I have the Apple watch series five I’ll begin holding here the 9:45 from Garmin and they pull Vantage V and then I’ve got a chest strap on right here the HRM dual and the armed right there underneath my shirt I have the Polaroids one the heart rate strap so that’s our rate sensor to go ahead and measure as well so lots of sensors paired up logo head record everything giving all study here now in the case of the act of two I’m going to use the end of mondo app because that’s really the only app that allows me to get the full fidelity the daven I would have it so with all that said
I’m gonna go ahead and give it started and we’ll cook and I’ll catch up in the park somewhere okay so one apologize right now for any one that’s gonna get in the lens on this run that’s gonna get back to life today so sorry if those little dots on there initial impressions about a mile into the park at this point and it’s not so hot like heart rate accuracy it goes in steps so I’ll be sitting there like 132 beats per minute and then five seconds later go boom 148 and then I’ll show it again the same thing the next time I see it so if you introduce to you what the recorded data looks like let the on display data it is very latent now like completely useless but definitely not good from a GPS pay standpoint it’s just a roll of dice right now look 658 but for the first two seconds seven and a half it shows 7:30 so again very late and like the refresh rate is all rotten wack whatever look again 633 right now actual place 720 708 720 so not super posh now if you’re finding this video interesting or useful or anything I always want to thank you for running out in this crunch happened
I passed the conditions here go and hit that light going down the bottom there really helps in the video and the channel quite a bit now where did I run through the Rijksmuseum here and the reason we’re doing that is because from an accuracy standpoint this is no different than running through a tunnel or under a large highway overpass so I want to see what the GPS does it’s completely straight shot so there isn’t any lectern here I just lets you connect the dots between the two sides now most these buildings are only between four and six storeys tall so not super big or super tough I don’t expect to have any really tall buildings on today’s run well it’s a good test on the Left see how they do he supplies the screws the PPF these days this is a distance one as the watches are all kind of insane ball for 5.07 on the polar Vantage 5.25 on the Apple watch your armor at five point one six and these Samsung a four point nine seven so non-ideal and if you were running something like the marathon here in a couple weeks it’s five miles being almost a third of a mile off at this point isn’t ideal that means you’re talking C times five again basically you’re talking a crap-ton that’s definitely a bit of an issue but you can also be totally wrong on distance and right on track doesn’t it look at afterwards it’s time of you a few Sprint’s to test at the camera not right here go down there and they come back and forth my rough pace plan here is gonna be about five to five twenty a mile we’ll see how things go and I’m four times down from the other threes down there should be about twenty or thirty second long intervals we’ll be over cold ice the same face we won’t be getting in the reasonably short high-intensity Sprint’s is that one of the common failure points pop at a heart rate is to walk on a cadence so if you can’t your heart rate the next-biggest thumping thing in actual your feet so it’s always a great test to see how well handles swift changes a pace like intervals which most runners do at some point and so that’s kind of why I tend to do those okay here we are finish things up a little bit total distances full of answers V 6.8 for miles the Garmin 7.01 the Apple watch seven point zero eight and ten thumb six point five five miles now a quick note on getting files off of this stuff I’ve written an entire post on how to do this down the description they’re super detailed for both iOS as well as Android because getting files off of these watches is a complete mess and particularly the way it comes out of samsung health okay
when I start off at the heart rate side of things I’m using the DCR analyzer you can check it out in the description down below there if you want to create your own sets to compare stuff back and forth you can see it right away there took about four and a half almost five minutes for the act of two to actually lock my heart rate even though it had a heart rate lock before we left the run it just lost it and then how to reacquire it or whatever the case is that’s pretty bad there’s a ton of spikes and kind of a ton of wonkiness in general until about 10 minutes in or so and then things stabilize for a couple minutes never on the 15 minute mark or so all of them kind of got a bit wonky though there are some trends in there even if they’re hard to kind of pick out of this I number one the Apple watch spiked up at the top because that’s what this series 5 does these days and then below that you see the purple in the green lines of the chest strap and then of the optical heart rate sensor on my upper arm the pullover h1 this is pretty dependable so my heart rate was definitely increasing there I was probably doing a bit of a increase in pace the Samsung watch just completely bottomed out entirely and it missed that and did some wonky stuff but then it got back on track and by and large with exception this is one drop right there albeit a 20 beat per minute drop it pretty good for a fair chunk of this run like that’s better than the Samsung watches have been in the past and so that isn’t bad keeping in mind in comparison to the Apple watch this track is horrendous and high rate of the Apple watch is a pretty bad track from a heart rate standpoint so yeah it is what it is I will give credit though for these Sprint’s back here it’s actually pretty darn close all these watches did a great job by staying very very close together which surprised me given the intensity these Sprint’s you can see up to 180 beats per minute and then I kind of cool back down again to 160 so these are some pretty hard sprints and it nailed this like there is I have no real issues with any of these particular heartrate plots from a sprint standpoint so let’s talk GPS accuracy in general you saw the run you saw where I ran nothing like crazy complex all this was actually pretty easy from a GPS standpoint so to begin with the things were in the river a little bit there with that red track in the canal not horrendous still like there are other cases where it was worse for the unit for example here in the park the puller was off in the trees and the bushes and the lakes and everything and the rest of units were pretty darn close but all the other watches were within a pretty close range though they were perfect like you’ll see
I was cutting through buildings right there that I shouldn’t have been going through this section here so that the middle of the building itself see if I can zoom in a bit more right there you’ll see that they got that correct the Pollard end of course and then the Samsung was plotted its next point off the side over here which means that it guests for a bit and it guessed wrong that’s not a horrendous example of that but it’s not ideal the pole was obviously is a worse example that you can see those Samsung bends struggled going across this section here didn’t really seem to have good GPS lock and just sort of guesstimated and in fact all these units actually struggled a little bit in this section right here the Apple went ahead and over smoothed it so it looks prettier but it’s not actually any more correct than the others the Garmin at 9:45 was also having some struggles in her as well going around the stadium no major issues here though the Sprint’s back and forth this is where you can see that red track of the Samsung off in the grass where the rest of the units are actually pretty darn close in that same spot every single time so from a first workout standpoint I would say it’s kind of like yeah so so it’s basically the same as the active one and some of my bike commuting workouts I’ve done the last two days here not workout by commuting the GPS has been roughly what I’m seeing here as well which is kind of like yeah it’s not great but it’s not horrible it’s like barely acceptable so there you go a complete look stuff hopefully you found this interesting or something or whatever the case is if so go ahead and like that subscribe button for plenty more sports Technology goodness there’s a lot more wearable stuff to come up this fall as I kind of clear through some of the backlog on things that need to be reviewed and other sports technology stuff that uh should be arriving on your doorstep your digital doorstep soon have a good one
Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2
