Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 9 and Ultra 2 bet big on battery

The Galaxy Watch 9, which is seeing a $30 price bump to $379.99, is mostly the same as last year’s Galaxy Watch 8. The most notable difference is that the Watch 9 (and the Ultra 2) ditch Samsung’s proprietary Exynos chipset for Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear Elite. Presumably, this is to help with power efficiency and AI processing. (Qualcomm announced the chip earlier this year at Mobile World Congress as an “AI-wearable first” chipset .) This could be to perhaps boost Gemini performance, and one new update with Wear OS 7 is you’ll be able to raise to talk without using the Gemini wake word. Samsung says it’s also tuned Gemini so it won’t trigger when you lift your wrist to check the time. It’s hard to gauge any performance boosts at a hands-on; some of my colleagues noticed a slight latency while scrolling through screens, but that could easily be due to demo models and wonky connectivity. We’ll have to see how the watches fare under normal testing conditions.

Battery capacity gets a slight boost on both the 40mm and 44mm watches. The smaller watch gets a roughly 20 percent increase to a 390mAh battery, while the larger one gets a more modest bump from 435mAh to 445mAh. The straps are 17 percent lighter with a new “air pocket structure,” which allows for a gap between the fabric and wrist for what Samsung promises is a more comfy, breathable fit.

The bulk of the Galaxy Watch 9’s updates come in the form of four new preventive health metrics, which are also coming to the Ultra 2. The first is a Vitals feature. After a week of consecutive wear during sleep, the Samsung Health app will generate a baseline for blood oxygen, heart rate, heart rate variability, skin temperature, and respiratory rate. In the morning, you’ll get a proactive alert if any deviate from your baseline, alongside some tips on how to get back on track. This is basically a dupe of Apple’s Vitals feature, which was released with watchOS 11 in 2024.

It’s also adding a Heart Health Score and a Daily Cardio Load metric. The former generates a score out of 100 every day based on your eight-day sleep time average, moderate to vigorous activity level, BMI, and vascular load. The latter helps you balance training versus recovery based on workout intensity, maximum training load, and real-time heart rate data. The idea is to help you determine if you’re overtraining, undertraining, or doing just the right amount. Again, these aren’t new ideas. We’ve seen similar features from Oura, Whoop, and Fitbit (now Google Health) over the past few years.

The most unique health metric is the new Fitness Index. It’s a radar chart that graphs how your strength, flexibility, endurance, cardio, and body composition compare to other Samsung users, based on factors like your VO2 Max, heart rate, step counts, activity time, and bioimpedance analysis results. You might be most familiar with radar charts if you play roleplaying games — it doesn’t tell you whether your metrics are good or bad, but rather it’s a method for visualizing your relative strengths and weaknesses.

This generation of Samsung watches feels like a mix of catching up to rivals’ health features and refining what already works. That’s not the worst combination, except for the fact that all the watches are more expensive. The company has been slowly increasing the prices of its wearables over time — though geopolitical factors probably play some role in this year’s bumps, too. Even so, you never like to see prices go up.

The watches are available for preorder starting today and are expected to ship starting August 7th.

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