PSA: Samsung galaxy watch 4 is like a 1st gen product. Overheating issue, scratches easily, buggy

What people reported and I personally experienced are

- overheating issue (it even overheats when I'm still setting it up first time)
- buggy (watch can't connect to the internet despite wifi is fine)

On top of those, What I found people reports on Samsung forum, reddit, etc but I hadn't experienced

Edit:btw the battery is really small. It took 20 percent in just 30 minutes of me biking. With GPS only. No wifi no Bluetooth.

Coming from a smart band that lasts for a few days to weeks (if used regularly) and almost a month if mostly idle, this is quite surprising.

• The black paint / anodized material / screen scratch easily
• Stuck LTE (only on LTE model), thus draining battery
• Severe battery drain (goes empty in less than a minute when used for phone call)

On top of that, it also have region locked features and have Samsung exclusive features that are disabled when paired to non-samsung phone (can be circumvented on Android)

 

ouch that sucks. I have a garmin forerunner 235. looking at getting the 945 early next year. I perfer a watch that just works and gets great battery life. Don't need to run apps or anything on it.

 

Yeah, that forerunner use plastic polymer so it should be super durable too.

coming from huawei smart band with plastic body that lasts for weeks with normal use and almost a month with very light use... And zero bugs... And super durable (I wash it with soap, its been stepped on, hit a wall and metal railings with zero scuff mark)...

I'm really confused why a smart watch, from Samsung, with 5x the price, have so many issues / defective by design stuff.

Although when it works well, it is indeed awesome to use. Like How almost everything is customisable so I can customize a lot of stuff that's not to my taste and needs (like... Why the current time is so small in the biking mode? I simply changed that. On my huawei I'm stuck with tiny current time).

The blood pressure feature also need annoying first time calibration using conventional arm pump blood pressure device thingy. It does works fine after that tho. Only deviates around 2 points from the conventional device.

 

You have a finite amount of space to put in the lte , bluetooth , wifi a powerful enough arm chip to run all the programs on the watch and so on so forth.

Even the forerunner 945 with lte doesn't run anything but watch centric stuff like time , heart rate , music and maps. There isn't really much going on there so you get really good battery life. Its a trade off.

 

The efficiency of Samsung galaxy watch 4 is quite low even when everything is disabled (a week max).

 

that is a real shame.

I am going to upgrade. I am sad there aren't new garmins this year outside of the 945. I think fall of next year is to long for me to wait. My garmin is starting to mess up with its heart rate monitoring. But it is about 5 years old and has done many 10k and half marathons .
I think i will get a fenix 6 or 945. Still trying to figure it out. Work gives us $500 and I am looking to switch companies so want to do it as early as possible.

 

How about looking at other brands like Amazfit? It have long lasting smart watches and the features also seems to be competitive with garmin.

Although I don't know how good each of those features are (e.g. Does the GPS accurate and quick to lock on? Etc)

 

I have a decade of garmin data so its easier to stay in the system. Also they tend to make the better product. The 945 is really nice. I'm just always worried i am going to buy and then boom the new ones hit lol


945 lte was released in the later summer

The fenix 6 was released 2 years ago.. so you know another one is coming

 

Indeed. And the new ones released nowadays probably will have a lot more features than before as nowadays is more and more common for smart watches to have extra features like skin temperature sensor, blood pressure sensor, etc.

And even if didn't care with the extra features, buying close to new model release could result in buyer's remorse due to the price change (as the older models usually got a nice discounts).

And yeah, the ecosystem lock is deal breaker. my huawei supports sync to Google fit, but my galaxy watch 4 did not.

I though as it is a wear os device it must be supporting Google fit sync... . But nooope. It supports strava sync instead.

 

Mate have you ever had a tech product that worked decently?

 

LOL. It's a problem bias. I post issues but not post stuff that's going well, like

• PSVR (but I have the gen 1, so no hdr)
• .......

Uh.... That's it? ROFL.

Even my PS4 pro is problematic (loud as heck, and have hdmi blackouts). My Xbox Series S have warped outer case (fixed after I disassembled it and assembled it again).

My switch was perfect until it starts to drift.

Btw the issues with galaxy watch 4 is more widespread than my usual issues, as it keeps filling the galaxy watch subreddit front page even months after the thing has been released.


Edit: oh even the hyundai ioniq BEV I test drive months ago also have issue when I drove it. Hahaha.

Someone need to hire me as tester / QA. I will simply walk there, and things will start exploding left and right.

 

Garmin has been amazing at supporting their watches. My 235 which released in 2015 still gets updates. Just not feature updates. This is true for all their watches . But there is one dark spot the 645. It was the first x45 watch but it hasn't gotten new features of the other x45 watches.

So I'm worried the 945 Lte will be a weird middle ground where it will quickly stop getting feature updates

 

btw i just checked at huawei smart watches, and whoa! They do offer long battery life. Up to 14 days of actual use (they even clearly list the use case by minutes for them to get 14 days).
While Samsung claims 40 hours without listing how they managed to get 40 hours. Despite samsung is using 5nm SoC, and they have expertise in making power efficient AMOLED screen.

but then i googled around again. It seems watches/bans with proprietary OS like huawei, garmin, amazfit, etc all lasts for weeks to month.

So maybe Galaxy Watch 4 have horrendous battery life because it is using Android Wear / Wear OS?

 

most of these watches don't have all the features of the galaxy or apple watch. For instance the majority of garmins have a tft non touch screen. They also only have basic text and messaging support limiting you to getting your messages from your phone and using premade responses

my 235 lasts about 7 days with 3 hour long runs in there. It used to last longer but I guess 4/5 years takes its toll on it

Some of the new garmins have a solar charger built into the screen and the enduro gets like 30 days of actually usage

 

fuck.

i reported my issues with watch 4 to samsung and they told me to bring it for service. I brought it to service

1. They rejected my photo proof. they want me to record a continuous video showing the issue and then flipping the watch to show the watch serial number. How the FUCK am i supposed to do that? holding the phone with mouth? and the serial number is ridiculously thin and small.
2. they broke the clear coating in 4 spots. I stupidly didnt notice this when i was taking the watch from samsung service.
3. they only resintalled the OS and says there's nothing wrong with it. they've swapped it with a new batttery and compared it with its original battery, they observed no difference. so they put back the original battery.

FUCK

i guess i gotta stick with Chinese stuff then. Xiaomi, huawei, lenovo, etc never disappoint me this much.

sure my lenovo laptop has its motherboard, battery, keyboard all replaced in less than a year, but at least lenovo was super easy to deal with and didnt leave marks on the laptop body. Same with xiaomi, got its motherboard replaced in less than a year but they didnt leave a mark (they need to reopen it multiple times due to dusts in camera, etc tho)

EDIT: oh, and my xiaomi smart band was super cheap, battery last almost a month, ZERO bugs, works fine even with me abusing it (stepped-on, knocked to wall, daily wash with soap!)

 

ROFL

Brought the watch to Samsung service, then when I retrieve it, one of the inner box is now teared up.

And my mistake : I didn't record a video of the boxes beforehand.

They require a video proof of the box condition before I brought it to service.

What a service