Samsung built its thinnest watch yet, and the battery paid for it.
Justin Diaz spent several weeks with the 44mm Galaxy Watch 9 for Android Headlines, on a review unit Samsung supplied and did not get to read first. His verdict is favorable and specific about where it stops being favorable: the watch is the most comfortable Galaxy Watch he has worn, and it is the one he had to charge soonest.
The comfort is real and it is measurable. At 8.6mm the case is the slimmest the line has been, and the 44mm weighs 34g, two tenths of a gram more than last year. Diaz wore it to bed and woke up without the usual complaint about a lump on his wrist. Sapphire crystal covers the display, which runs to 3,000 nits and stayed readable in direct sun, and Samsung's lug system still pops a band off with one button.
Raise to talk, the gesture that starts Gemini without a button, failed for most of his time with the watch, and once he got it going the responses came back almost instantly.
Battery is where the thinness lands. The 40mm cell grew from 325mAh to 390mAh this year and the watch still ran down inside a day of ordinary use, sooner if he actually used it. Refilling it takes nearly two hours from empty over a 10W wireless pad, which is slow enough that the shortfall compounds: a watch that runs out by evening and takes half a morning to recover is a watch you plan around.
The chip is the part we have been waiting to see in someone's hands. We reported in July that the Galaxy Watch 9 was dropping Exynos for Qualcomm, and Diaz is the first person we have seen say what that feels like. The Snapdragon Wear Elite is the same silicon in the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2, and paired with Wear OS 7 he calls it the snappiest the line has ever been, quick enough that he noticed inside ten minutes.
One feature did not work. Raise to talk, the gesture that starts Gemini without a button, failed for most of his time with the watch, and once he got it going the responses came back almost instantly. A gesture that is excellent when it fires and absent when it does not is a worse experience than no gesture at all, because the wearer keeps trying.
Against that, Samsung guarantees five years of software updates, and the watch starts at $379.99.
This is one reviewer with one unit, and the numbers that matter most here are the ones only long wear produces. Diaz's battery result was, by his own account, better than what others reported, which puts the honest range somewhere between a full day and less than one. The chip claim is the sturdier half: performance is the thing a few weeks of use settles, and it settles in Samsung's favor.