Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch 8 monitors your physical and mental health, covering sleep, heart rate, stress, and a wellness score, and it uses that data to coach you on better ways to act on the information. Each morning, the Energy Score shows how recovered you are. This information helps the watch build workouts based on your current energy level. In addition, the screen is brighter, and the case is thinner than past designs. Battery life will last through an entire day, including overnight sleep and sleep tracking.
Head over to Amazon to get the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 for just $260, down from its usual price of $300. That’s a $40 discount and 13% off.
A Wear OS smartwatch that tracks sleep, heart rate, and recovery
The Energy Score sets this apart from a basic step-tracking watch. It uses your sleep quality, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, and daily activity to create a numerical representation of your current state. That number tells you whether you should work out harder or take it easier. Most people have a good idea of their recovery status, but the Energy Score can catch times when you think you’re okay and you’re not.
Tracking occurs throughout the night, and after completion, it provides a detailed report on the time spent in each sleep stage. Using that same data over multiple nights, Sleep Coaching creates a personalized plan tailored specifically to your unique sleep patterns, which beats receiving a low-quality sleep score with no suggestions for improvement attached to it.
Your heart rate is monitored continuously rather than at set intervals. If the watch identifies an irregular heartbeat, it will flag it. Compatible phones also allow ECG, blood pressure, and blood oxygen level measurements while you sleep. These features don’t replace your doctor, but they provide something tangible to discuss at your next visit.
The new case design makes the watch sit thinner on your wrist than previous models, which matters because many users remove watches before bed because they feel bulky. Once you take the watch off at night, you lose sleep data, which defeats the purpose of buying a fitness device in the first place.
Fitness tracking includes running, cycling, swimming, weightlifting, and dozens of other exercises. Automatic exercise detection is available for the most popular ones, so if you start walking and then begin running, you don’t need to press anything. It also includes body composition measurement, which reads muscle mass, body fat percentage, and body water levels by analyzing sensors on the back of the watch in about 15 seconds.
Since the Galaxy Watch 8 runs Wear OS, you have access to the full app catalog rather than a closed system limited to whatever the manufacturer decided to include. You can install navigation apps, music services, payment options, and third-party fitness trackers directly on the watch. That also means the software keeps receiving updates and new applications over the years you own it, rather than staying frozen at whatever shipped on the day you bought it.