Battle Royale (with Cheese): Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 vs. Fossil Gen-5
By: Joshua Beck
Tags: Tech, Wear Os, Samsung, Wearables, Technology

Battle Royale (with Cheese): Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 vs. Fossil Gen-5

Tizen V. Wear OS: Dawn of Justice

Last week, I wrote about the choices Android users have for a smart watch; primarily, I broke it down between Fitbit, Samsung, and Wear OS (there are other options, but those three are the ones most readily available, and the ones I’ve worn on my wrist).

Today, however, I’d like to get a little more in-depth with two of the three options: Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active 2 and Google’s Fossil Gen-5. Both are similarly priced (and went on similar discounts this Black Friday), and I’d say they are two of the best options for any Android user who wants a watch that does more than tell time.

Unfortunately, Android doesn’t have one smartwatch to rule them all like iOS does. Neither are the best option, however, and I want to get into where each watch excels, and where each falls short.

Keep in mind, I’ve paired both to my Google Pixel 3a, which I think is a pretty good phone to test both watches on. If you use a Samsung phone, the Watch Active 2 will have a bit of a leg up on Wear OS (I’ll get to that).

Let the battle commence.

Look and Feel

Let’s get the little things out of the way, shall we? Both watches have the same size screen (44mm; the Galaxy Watch Active 2 is also offered in 40mm with a cheaper price and slightly smaller battery), and both are decently comfortable to wear on a daily basis.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 is a very sleek watch (especially if you get one of the stainless steel models; mine is, sadly, aluminum, but still very nice), reminiscent of the Apple Watch (except, you know… round), whereas the Fossil Gen-5 looks like a more traditional watch (in fact, it looks very similar to this regular Fossil Watch). Both look good enough to wear on a daily basis and even when you are in formal wear. I’d say the Samsung Watch is better if you want your intelligent timepiece to stand out a bit, and the Fossil is best if you want it to blend in with other watches until you turn the screen on. That said, with everyone wearing Fitbits and Apple Watches these days, Fossil’s tried and true design might actually be the one that stands out.

The silicone watch bands that both came with irritated my skin, but that’s more of a personal problem, and something I solve quickly with a couple cheap watch bands from Amazon (ironically, both I got are copies of Apple’s popular Apple Watch bands; a Milanese loop and a sport loop). Neither watch comes with different size bands like Fitbits and Apple Watches, although Samsung’s original Galaxy Watch Active did. That was a bit of a shame, as the bands they came with were barely long enough for my wrists (before I got the 44 mm Watch Active 2, I tried the 40 mm, and that strap was too small; keep that in mind if you have a larger wrist).

As for the watch itself, the Samsung is somewhat lighter than the Fossil, but it also seems a little bulkier; they are actually about the same thickness as one another, but the Fossil’s tapered design gives the illusion that it’s a thinner device. Despite being lighter, however, it seemed like I felt the Samsung more on my wrist than the Fossil; that may be due to the larger sensor on the back of the Samsung, which seemed to leave a mark on my wrist after several hours, no matter what strap or band I was wearing or how loosely I wore it. It didn’t hurt; it was just noticeable.

The Fossil also has three physical buttons on one side that jut out a bit like a regular watch (the middle, of course, is a spinning crown). Depending on which wrist you wear it on, those knobs could cause some added annoyance, however, they are all relatively smooth. But they are definitely more of an irritant than the two flush buttons on the Samsung. A few times, I accidentally summoned Google Assistant or powered off the watch when I bent my wrist.

Winner: Tie; just depends on your personal preference, but I don’t think you can go wrong with either in the looks department. Neither are cheap-feeling or overly bulky.

Interface

That brings us to the ways you interact with the watches. Both, of course, are touchscreen, and the same size touchscreen, so navigating on either is relatively easy.

Where the watches begin to differ is the other ways you interact with the devices. On the Fossil, you can use the aforementioned buttons for quick navigation. The center crown quickly pulls up notifications and settings from the watch face, and scrolls through apps when you press the button in once. The other two buttons are programmable to open whichever apps you prefer to use quickly. I set it to Messages and Google Fit, although I’m not married to the latter (I just didn’t have a better option at the time). A double press of the top button also gets you to Google Pay, and I thought a double press of the bottom took your heart rate, but once I remapped the bottom button to trigger Google Play Music (no YouTube Music?!?), I realized there is no double press function for the bottom button; I was just triggering what the bottom button does once you are in the app. When using the music controls (the native music controls, not in the Spotify app), the top and bottom buttons function as back and forward track buttons, and the crown works for volume control. This is a useful function if you are wearing gloves or can’t look at the screen for some reason.

Oddly, though, the rotating crown doesn’t work in most of the apps you can download on the Fossil; the crown spins uselessly once you enter an app, and you are forced to use the touchscreen to navigate. It doesn’t even work on the Google Assistant screen, which lives to the left of the watch face. It’s not bad, it’s just weird, weird that so many apps don’t have the functionality built in to use the main control feature on the watch. It is even inconsistent within apps and settings; several times I’ve encountered areas where the crown scrolls through one screen, but once I make a selection it doesn’t work on the next screen. Because of this, I feel like I waste a a few seconds each time trying to use the crown to scroll before I remember I have to touch the screen.

Holding the crown in activates Google Assistant, and you can also access Google by swiping to the right on the screen (only from the watch face; otherwise this gesture is a back button). Swiping left on the watch face gives you app widgets. Up gets you to notifications, and down gets you to some quick settings.

On the Watch Active 2, you get two almost flush buttons on the side. The top button- which is elongated a bit- serves as a back button, and with a long press activates Samsung Pay. It also houses the watch’s electrocardiogram sensor, which Samsung has yet to activate. The bottom button pulls up your list of apps, and with a double press activates your shortcut (by default this is Bixby, but you can and should change it, if for nothing else than the fact that you can summon Bixby with your voice at any time).

There’s no rotating crown, but there’s a rotating touch bezel surrounding the screen. This was a feature sorely missing from the original Active, and one of the biggest selling points for the 6-month newer Active 2. Unlike on the Fossil, where the crown has very limited functionality, Watch Active 2’s operating system seems entirely built around this method of using the device. From the watch face, running your finger clockwise takes you through widgets for different apps (similar to Google’s, but much better; I’ll get to that). Counterclockwise takes you through notifications. Like on the Fossil, a down swipe gives you quick settings, although unlike the Fossil, you can pick and choose which settings to have on this screen. On the Samsung, you can also access the quick settings panel from any screen, whereas on WearOS, you have to be on the watch face to access it. Again, not bad, just weird; at least the watch face is just a click of the crown away from wherever you are at all times.

Where the big difference in the interface is, however, is in the apps. While you could argue that Google has a better app store than Samsung, I haven’t come across an app yet on the Watch Active 2 that didn’t utilize the touch bezel. Where the rotating crown works like a dead fish in the Spotify app, for example, the touch bezel scrolls through lists and tracks, skips songs while you are playing music, and controls the volume (if you use the Google Play Music app or the regular music controls while playback is coming from your phone, the crown does control volume, and the buttons skip tracks). It feels like a much better implementation of the available technology, and with Samsung’s better widget interface, it just feels like you get to the information you are looking for faster on the Samsung Watch Active 2.

That information also seems to make better use of the screen on the Samsung watch. For one thing, on the Samsung, each notification is given it’s own separate screen to the left of the watch face. On the Fossil, notifications are presented as a list of white text on a black background. You can tap to expand a notification and see your interaction options, but otherwise it is just a list. When a new message comes in on the Samsung, the screen is filled with the face of the person sending you the message while it loads, where the Fossil just shows- once more- white text against a black backdrop. Since both watches are OLED screens, that is probably a bit of a battery saver for the Fossil (and the Fossil definitely needs it, but I’ll get to that), but I find reading a message is much easier on the Samsung screen. Buttons, like the reply button for a message, are also bigger and more colorful on the Samsung, which just makes it easier to hit what you wanted.

Winner: Samsung. The touch bezel and how everything reacts to it stands a clear mile above Fossil’s half-baked rotating crown.

Usage

But the interface doesn’t matter as much compared to the usefulness of the watch. I mean, that’s why you bought a smart watch, is it not?

And, frankly, you won’t go wrong with either watch in this case; both will offer the standard features of health tracking, text messaging, phone calling, music controls, etc. and so forth. And whatever task you set upon to do with your watch, you will accomplish it just fine.

Both watches get stuff done quickly, too; that was a major pain point with the Fossil Sport I tried earlier this year, as I found Wear OS clunky and laggy, but Fossil has expanded the memory on this watch and I really only experienced lag when I first turned on the watch (or restarted it after the battery died). Overall, the Fossil Gen-5 has a much better Wear OS experience than previous models. Samsung’s benefit in this area is the same as Apple’s for the Apple Watch: the OS and hardware Samsung is using in their watch were specifically designed for each other.

But the experience does differ between the two, especially for the Samsung watch when you aren’t using a Samsung phone.

The primary example is with messaging. The Watch Active 2 (and any Samsung watch) is designed to work with Samsung’s own messaging app. And that’s a damn shame; I even tried to install Samsung’s app on my Google Pixel, and it just didn’t work. That means you won’t have the full messaging app on your watch, and you can’t go back and look at the whole conversation that you’ve had with the person. You can absolutely still use the watch for messaging, however; you will still get all your notifications from Google’s messaging app, which you can reply to, and you can send a new message to anyone by selecting them from your contacts list or by asking Bixby- yeah, Bixby- to do it. I tried downloading a third party messaging app that was supposed to work with the Samsung watch a little better (Pulse Messenger), but I could never get it to sign in on the watch, so I can’t say how well that would have worked once I got it to… you know… work.

On the Fossil watch, messaging works exactly like you’d expect it to. You can reply to notifications, tell Google to send a text, and view your entire conversation in the app. With Google’s Messages app installed on the watch, you can also view a picture that has been sent to you, whereas the Watch Active 2 will only tell you that you’ve received a picture.

How you send a text differs as well. Of course, on both watches you can dictate a message, and frankly, Google is a better listener. On the Fossil, you can also use a full- yet small- swipe keyboard to write out your message. Samsung offers a similar letter-drawing program like you will find on the Apple Watch, as well as a T9 keyboard for when you would rather type it out (but who wants to use a T9 keyboard?). Both input methods work well enough; drawing each letter takes longer, but the full keyboard is so small that it is too easy to hit the wrong letter. Google is smart enough to guess what you meant to type most of the time, but if you are spelling a name or something, it’s very, very easy to mess up. I did, however, find the swipe keyboard easy to use no matter which wrist I wore the watch on, whereas drawing letters was a real chore when I wore the watch on my dominant hand.

Either watch works fine when using them to reply quickly to a message, and replying with a quick message. And, frankly, that’s all you really need; if you are having a more in-depth conversation or writing longer responses, chances are you are going to do that on your phone anyway, right?

Winner: Tie. In most areas, I’ll give this to Samsung, however, if you are using anything other than a Samsung phone, the Fossil will give you a better messaging experience.

Assistant

One of the best features of having a smart watch is having your digital assistant on your wrist. And that’s perhaps the biggest difference between these two watches.

Of course, the Fossil watch will have Google Assistant front and center. And it functions just as you would expect Google Assistant to do. At least, almost. I’ve found there are certain commands that I can ask my phone that the watch stumbles over. For instance, asking Google Assistant to pause the music I’m listening to on my phone- or to skip a track- comes back with “Nothing is playing right now” even though the watch shows me the track that is playing on my phone. Similarly, when I asked Assistant to read my messages, it just said “anything else?”

Samsung, unfortunately, pairs their watch with Bixby. But as lackluster as Bixby is, for the most part it does the job it is intended to do on the watch, though at times it is mighty slow to load. It performed the similar task of pausing or skipping my song without question, however, when I tried to repeat the event it tried to tell me to sign in to Spotify (I was playing music in Google Play Music) and then told me nothing was playing (I had to first go to the music player so that it synced up with my phone; once it did, telling it to pause the song worked instantly). But again, if you aren’t using a Samsung phone, it is incapable of reading your latest messages.

Reminders are another pain point regardless of which Assistant you use. With the Samsung, you can set reminders through Bixby, and Bixby reminds you promptly, but those reminders don’t carry over to your non-Samsung Android phone in the event you aren’t wearing the watch when the reminder goes off. Likewise, you can set reminders on your phone with Google Assistant, but I haven’t been able to get the Samsung watch to mirror those notifications (which is a real problem). On the Fossil watch, I can set a reminder with Google Assistant, but I’ve encountered a weird bug wherein the reminder fails to go off until I’ve unlocked my phone (passing the timestamp I gave it), and the watch doesn’t show the reminder at all. I looked this up after spending hours (yes, hours) looking at settings on the watch and the phone, and discovered that this has been a known issue in Wear OS for almost 2 years. That does not bode well, but I’ll get to that in a little bit.

And if you really need Google’s intelligence on your Samsung watch, there’s a hack for it. It’s relatively easy, and I’ve actually set it to replace the quick action for Bixby on my watch. It can’t do all the things that Assistant can do on your phone- it can’t even do all the things Bixby can do on the watch (it is given no access to the watch’s functions at all)- but it is a hell of a lot better than Bixby when it comes to getting information (Bixby couldn’t even tell me who Abraham Lincoln was).

Same as with some of the usage factors: both Assistants, for the most part, get the job done. If I need my Assistant to do more than answer a quick question or set a reminder, again, I’m gonna pull out the phone, because it is more capable.

This is the hardest area for me to choose between the watches. I love Google Assistant. I used it when I had an iPhone. It was the primary reason I wanted to switch to Android. I even bought a flip phone that has it built in. And the fact that I can jerry rig the Samsung watch to have a version of Google Assistant is better than nothing, but outside of performing the basic tasks, Bixby is, well, Bixby. It kinda sucks. But the Google Assistant on Wear OS is not equal to the Assistant on my phone; it can do maybe 90% of what my phone can, but the glaring omissions like not controlling the music it knows my phone is playing makes me feel like it’s jerry rigged on the Fossil watch, too.

Winner: Tie, oddly enough. Google Assistant is clearly a better assistant than Bixby, but there are perplexing omissions in Google’s Assistant on the Fossil watch, being unable to do the basic things I expect the watch to do in some cases. And the fact that I can put a version of Google Assistant on the Samsung watch means I can have the best of both worlds. Bixby is shit in a fight, but it gets the basics done.

Health and Fitness

Of course, one of the biggest reasons to get a smart watch is for the fitness aspect of it. And both watches work well enough; each has a heart rate sensor that monitors your every heartbeat. The Samsung watch has a much beefier sensor (like I said, for better or worse I noticed it after it sat on my wrist for hours at a time) with eight different senors staring at your skin, as well as the EKG sensor that hasn’t been activated.

Likewise, Samsung’s Health app seems to be much more capable than Google Fit, with more workout routines and things like activity reminders to tell you to get your ass off the couch. One literally popped up while I was writing this comparison; a person pops up on screen that says “Try Standing Up: It’s been almost an hour. Get some fresh air?” From there, you can dismiss the reminder (it will stay as a tiny icon on your watch face until you do stand up), but it also gives you a recommendation to try a stretch.

This is where Samsung really shows it’s worth in the Health market; built in work outs. Not only did the Samsung watch measure my activity, it has guided routines built into the watch. This is a fantastic feature for anyone who wants to get fit but hasn’t really done a lot of working out, as not only did the watch recommend something to do (selecting “try a stretch” brought me to a menu of different stretch activities; I chose a torso twist), it then showed me how to do it, and then recorded me doing it. It’s a great feature, but with one caveat; it was very difficult to find these guided workouts on my own. It seems hit and miss which work outs have the guided cartoon character showing you what to do, and which workouts it just assumes you should already know how to do. And to find out which ones come with the guide (complete with a voice over from Bixby, which is enough to make anyone want to stop working out), you have to start the work out and cross your fingers. Seems like a great feature hidden behind a real bummer.

Both Samsung and Google Fit can record work out sessions; each have a ton of preset workouts, ranging from the usual (walking, running) to the less common (stroller walking, wheelchair).

Samsung’s health app also has places for you to record your own data; you can record how much water you drank, your weight, and what food you ate (Samsung will do all the work for you; you don’t need to know how many calories are in the Bojangles butter biscuit to record it).

Google’s perceived win in this area is, once more, the app store. With apps like Cardiogram, My Fitness Pal, and Sleep as Android, the data your watch collects can be tailored to different needs based on the apps you give permission to.

But that is more of a perceived win and not an actual win; getting the third party apps to feed their resources back into Google Fit is proving to be… problematic. Sleep as Android successfully captured my sleep, although it didn’t seem to be as accurate as the Samsung; it showed that I spent 95% of my night in deep sleep, where previous nights with Samsung’s health app show relatively little deep sleep, more REM, and even times I woke up in the night. But the Google Fit app seems to be completely unaware that sleep data was recorded, and I’ve yet found a way to bring that information into the Fit app. I’m sure it is doable, but the point here is that the Samsung app works 100% from the moment you turn it on, whereas Google Fit seems to require a lot of time (and separate apps) to start working.

Heart health is another area where both offer different options; Samsung has the option to constantly measure your heart rate, where Fossil seems to measure it every couple of minutes. Samsung’s constant measuring has some additional benefits (and additional battery drain), such as detecting an abnormality and reading stress levels (more on that in a moment). But both watches seem to capture the same heart rate; I didn’t see any wild fluctuations or discrepancies from one or the other, even though Samsung’s watch has more sensors packed in. I’m sure the extra sensors do something more for me, but on the surface, I didn’t see any benefit to having the extra tech.

The Fossil comes with Cardiogram, which does a much better job of analyzing your heart rate data than Google Fit. Cardiogram also lets you join mRhythm’s heart health research study, where you can let them use your data to fight heart disease (this is optional, you can definitely keep your data to yourself if you prefer), and you can also connect it to your insurance to earn rewards.

But again, that’s using a different app from the main fitness app installed on your watch. When it comes to heart health in Google Fit, all you really get is a simple graph that shows where your heart rate went up and down. You don’t get much more in Samsung Health, but it looks like there is more available information with the graphs (yes, you get two in Samsung Health).

Both watches also recommend breathing exercises (similar to Apple’s breathe app). For Samsung, this is found in the stress widget or under Stress Level in the Health app on the watch, whereas you will find it either in your apps list as Fit Breathe, or in the main Google Fit app on the watch. Samsung once again does a better job of utilizing the data from this exercise; you can find a graph showing your stress level throughout each day in the phone app, where Google Fit just shows you when you took a breathing exercise and how many deep breaths you took. Once again, Cardiogram does a better job of capturing your heart health data, but it doesn’t seem to know when you’ve taken a breathing exercise beyond the difference in your heart rate.

Winner: Samsung. While not quite as good as Fitbit’s app, Samsung Health captures a metric ton of data and utilizes it without the need for third party apps to be installed. It also offers some guided work out routines (though whether or not your chosen work out has one is maddeningly inconsistent). Now that Google has bought Fitbit, there is a solid chance that Google Fit will get a whole lot better (or downright replaced by the Fitbit app).

Apps

Really, both watches come pre-installed with just about everything you would need. But if you want to look outside what comes in the box, they both offer… well… some apps.

Initially I felt that Google’s App Store was going to be better than Samsung’s, but frankly they are both lacking in the app department. I’d still give an edge to Google on this one, though, because there are more mainstream apps available through their store.

From the Play store, you can fill up your watch’s storage with Google Keep, Google Maps, Facebook Messenger (although this is really more like a plug-in for notifications; you can’t read your message history), Google Camera, etc. and so forth. Sure, most of those that I listed are Google’s own apps, but they add a lot of functionality to the device. Samsung’s watch can’t download any of the Google apps, but there’s some third party apps to get you through things like navigation and translation. Most likely you can find something to do what you need it to. The Google Play store also has a cool feature where it finds compatible apps for your watch based on what is installed on your phone; for example, I installed Sleep as Android on my phone, and the Play Store on the app recommended I download the same app on my watch. This just made it faster to make sure I had the necessary companion app on my watch.

In fact, since the Samsung is designed to pair with Android phones, it’s kind of a shame that there isn’t any support for Google’s core apps. I’ve already talked about the lack of support for Google’s own messaging app and the lack of Google Assistant (outside of the work around), but without the option to install Google Maps or other popular apps that are probably already on your phone, the Samsung watch reminds me eerily of the Window’s Phone- it needs a better app store to survive.

But for the most part, I’ve just used the apps that were already available. Alarm clock, flashlight, calendar, NFC payment, etc. Primarily the apps that notify me of things happening on my phone so I don’t have to pull out my phone. For anything else, like taking a note or playing a game, I’d rather use my phone anyway.

Winner: Google. Both could use some improvement, but Google has more useful (read: Google) apps available in the store.

Music

Both watches have the ability to store music on the watch and even play it back on the built in speakers (as well as over linked Bluetooth headphones), but if you already subscribe to a specific music program, that might dictate which watch is best for you. Both watches come with Spotify installed, but only the Samsung watch can download music for offline listening from your paid Spotify subscription. For the Fossil watch, you can download music from Google Play Music (I assume eventually YouTube Music will replace this, but for now, it is non-existent on Wear OS; thankfully, a subscription to one gets you the other, but unthankfully, there’s no way to move your playlists back and forth just yet).

In practice, downloaded music works much better on the Samsung watch, whether this is due to Samsung’s OS or Spotify’s programming, I’m not sure. I could never get music to play from Google Play Music, even with a full wifi connection. Both watches, however, will show music controls for any song played from your phone, even if it is from an unsupported app like Apple Music.

Winner: Samsung, if only because offline music with Spotify worked better than offline music with Google Play Music. If you aren’t planning on downloading your own tunes to your watch, either one works as well as the other.

Battery

What good any of this if the watch is dead on your wrist?

The good news is that both watches will get you through the day. But what matters is they day after that.

The Fossil watch offers several ways to preserve your battery, including a custom option that lets you choose which features are turned on and off. No matter what I’ve turned off, though, I haven’t gotten much more than a day out of it. On my fullest day, starting with the watch on my wrist with a full battery around 9:30 AM, it was down to the 20’s by midnight. That’s manageable, unless you want to use it for sleep tracking.

The Galaxy Watch Active 2, however, has lasted for several days. For example, on a similar full day, I left the house around 3 PM with the watch at 70% (and I hadn’t charged it since the day before), worked my full shift, wore it to bed to let it track my sleep, and wore it all day the next day. By 6:30 PM that next day, it was down to 19%, and I didn’t bother to charge it before I went out to dinner. By 9 PM, it was down to 15% (that’s when it finally prompted me to go into battery saving mode, which I ignored), and I doubt I’ll have to plug it up until I’m crawling into bed.

The Watch Active 2 has some battery saving features, but I have yet to turn any of them on, which means the battery in the Samsung lasts a hell of a lot longer with all features enabled than the Fossil does with over half of the features crippled. And frankly, if I have to disable most of the features I bought the watch for in order to avoid charging it before the end of the day, it’s not worth the money.

That said, where the Fossil lacks in stamina, it does make up for (slightly) in charging time. The Fossil charges with a little puck that magnetically attaches to the back; it isn’t a wireless charger like the Samsung, but instead two metal prongs connect to the two metal rings that surround the heart rate sensor. I was able to charge the Fossil from 0–100 in roughly an hour, which means if you find yourself with a dying watch (and have your charger with you), you can get some decent usage time by plugging it in for a few minutes.

The Samsung watch, by comparison, takes about two hours to reach a full battery from zero using the wireless charging puck that it comes with. It does charge wirelessly, and if you use one of the newer Galaxy phones, you can charge your watch by sitting it on the back of your phone; that doesn’t help me with my Pixel 3a, but it’s worth knowing. Even with a longer charging time, whatever charge you get in the few minutes you plug it in before the next part of your day, the odds of it lasting the rest of that day are higher.

For me, battery life is a huge pain point. I hate having devices that I have to charge all the time. If my tech isn’t able to last me through the day without a wall outlet, it drives me nuts. Of course, the odds of me having a day where I’m on the go from morning until night without a chance to plug up are slim, but I prefer a device that I know can hold it’s own when I need it to. But with a smart watch, if it dies before I get home, its not like I’m stranded without a phone. And as it dies, that’s where things get interesting.

When the battery is about to die, Fossil puts the watch into “Time Only” mode. This mode is supposed to drastically increase battery life on the watch (on a full charge, it should last about a week in this mode) with one huge caveat: you’re smart watch is no longer smart. It’s just a watch. You get the time, the date, and Fossil’s logo at the press of the crown, and that’s it. Granted, that’s not what you bought the smart watch for, but in a pinch with a dying battery and no place to charge, it keeps your watch from becoming a paperweight.

Like I said, I haven’t really needed to use Samsung’s low power mode, so I don’t know how long it will keep my watch until I can juice up. Turning on power savings mode on Samsung gives you a grayscaled screen with time, date, and step count available, while shutting off most other features including raise to wake, the heart rate sensor, Bixby, and all apps besides the phone. You can still access notifications, however, it seems you only access the notifications that you had already received before going into low power mode.

It is a bit easier to get out of low power mode on the Samsung than it is to get out of Time Only mode on the Fossil; Samsung puts an “Off” button right on the screen. With a tap, your watch is back to full functionality within a few seconds. On the Fossil, you have to press and hold the crown until the watch restarts. A couple times, I had to slap the watch on the charger in order to get it out of Time Only mode.

Winner: Samsung. Samsung’s clearly mastered battery life better than Google, and in most cases you should get two days before you need to consider topping off the battery. That said, the Fossil should see you through most days, and it won’t take as long to recharge when you need to top off the battery. Personally, I’m the type of person who is going to charge it daily anyway; I used to have an Apple Watch. I know how it goes.

Support

I wanted to come back to that reminders thing. Because discovering that something so integral to having a smart assistant on your smart watch- and having a smart watch in general- isn’t working and hasn’t been working for almost two years and Google hasn’t bothered to fix it in that amount of time, well, that makes me feel like Wear OS is not the future of smart watches on Android. With their acquisition of Fitbit, Google is planning to revamp (or replace) Wear OS, but who knows what that would mean for this existing Fossil watch and it’s related Wear OS devices. And it also makes me concerned for when something else breaks in Wear OS- frankly I won’t expect a quick fix from Google, if they fix it at all.

Samsung, on the other hand, seems very focused on their wearables. I mean, they updated the Watch Active within 6 months with features users were requesting. They are, frankly, trying to be Apple’s direct competitor (and really, they are) and I think they know that their watch has to be to Android what the Apple Watch is to Apple. And you know what? Even with the few things that don’t work 100% on a non-Samsung Android phone, the Samsung Watch Active 2 is about as close as an Android user will get to the Apple Watch.

Winner: Who do you think?

Smartphone Companion App

I talked about apps and I talked about the programs you will need to install to use features like fitness and whatnot, but what about the watch apps themselves? Wear OS for the Fossil watch, and Samsung Wearables for the Samsung Galaxy Active 2.

Both get the job done; providing an interface to connect and control certain features of your watch. For Wear OS, that’s about it; you can change watch faces, you can tweak settings, and… well, you’re done. Most of the settings you have to change on the watch, which is fine, but if you’d rather use the larger phone screen to dive deep into certain settings, with Wear OS you are simply SOL.

Samsung’s app, however, is another area where it feels like this is meant to be a direct competitor to the Apple Watch. Samsung’s app controls everything about the watch, from your watch faces to your apps and widgets, Samsung Pay, Bixby. It houses the store to install new apps and watch faces, a Find My Watch function, ways to sync music and photos to the watch, and even an SOS mode that sends an emergency text or phone call to a contact of your choice. It feels like a much more fleshed out app, and makes your watch fully customizable without ever having to touch the watch itself.

Winner: Samsung. The Wear OS app, by comparison, feels half-baked, like it was designed only out of the necessity of having a companion app.

There are some other fun things to mention about these watches, things that may or may not help you decide which one to buy (and hell, I’m writing this half to decide which one to keep).

Both watches allow custom watch faces. At a glance, Samsung seems to have better options built in, however, you can download plenty more for either through their respective app stores. If you choose an analog watch face on the Samsung, you get the added benefit of it making a ticking sound just like a real watch (the sound only plays while the screen is on, however, and on some faces the ticking is way too fast).

Speaking of app stores, you can access both stores directly from the watch. As I mentioned, Google’s own app store is going to be better than Samsung’s if you are looking for a bunch of apps to customize your watch; personally, I don’t need much more than the basics, because if I need anything more than the features the watch comes with, chances are I’m gonna do it on my phone. But I had some trouble accessing Samsung’s store on the watch. I’m not sure if the issue is software related or because I’m not using a Samsung phone, but every time I tried to access Samsung’s app store, I received an error message. Not to fret, however; for both watches, you can also access the app stores from your phone (for Samsung’s on a non-Samsung phone, you have to go through the Samsung Wear app).

And speaking of apps (let’s just keep this train running), you should be aware of exactly what you’ll be required to install to use one of these suckers. For the Fossil watch, the only app you need is Wear OS. You may have to install additional apps for certain services, such as Google Fit, Cardiogram, and Noonlight, but that’s only if you want to use those services. For the Samsung, however, I had to install Samsung Wear to get started, as well as Samsung Accessory Service, a plug in for Watch Active, a separate plug-in for Samsung Pay, and then Samsung Health. I’m not sure how much all those apps and plug-ins hit my phone’s storage (probably not a lot), but it felt like an excessive amount of programs to download to get the watch to function with my phone. And it’s probably just me, but that seems like more room for a problem if one of those apps or plug-ins starts to malfunction.

Both watches feature NFC payment options- Google Pay on the Fossil, and Samsung Pay on the Samsung (though it is lacking the Galaxy phone’s ability to mimic the magnetic strip on your card). I found Samsung Pay was a little hit and miss; on some readers it worked fine, and on others it didn’t. It could have been user error; since I was standing in line, I didn’t try to troubleshoot it there and then.

The Fossil watch seems to better mirror all of the notifications I get on my phone; some apps don’t appear as options for the Samsung, and so there are a few notifications that I don’t get. They aren’t anything important- usually headlines from Google News or something that I didn’t need to see right away, but when I pull out my phone and see a notification icon that my watch didn’t know about, it is a little disconcerting.

I’ve had no connectivity issues with Samsung, but the same can’t be said for the Fossil watch. Every now and then, I turn on the screen to see that the Fossil watch has disconnected. It usually connects right back after a few seconds, but once I had to go in and manually reconnect it to my phone in Bluetooth settings. This probably has to do with the Bluetooth connections each watch has; Fossil uses 4.2, where Samsung uses the newer 5.0. Also, when I first unboxed it, I could only get the Fossil watch to stay connected to WiFi if I stayed on the connection page in settings. I haven’t had the problem since, so maybe the issue was fixed in one of the software updates I received.

Both watches feature some sort of a night mode; on the Samsung, pressing the moon icon in quick settings turns on Goodnight Mode, which darkens the screen and keeps the screen turned off until you press a button (so that your watch doesn’t blind you in the middle of the night). This also seems to start sleep tracking if you are wearing the watch. On the Fossil, tapping the watch icon in the quick settings simply turns off the screen until you press a button.

And the Winner Is…?

Well, that’s really up to you, isn’t it? Personally, I don’t think you can go wrong with either of these watches. Samsung has some clear benefits in certain areas, such as battery life, health tracking, and the user interface, but they tied for me in other areas, like design and usage. And Google outright won in the App category. And though I didn’t speak about it in depth, it’s there throughout the entire battle: Google has better compatibility with Android phones that aren’t made by Samsung.

If you need a winner to be chosen, it’s Samsung, but the Fossil’s latest Wear OS watch ins’t lagging behind as far as it used to. Perhaps with Google’s acquisition of Fitbit, Wear OS’ health options might improve over time. But there are major concerns discovering that there are some major issues with Wear OS that have gone unfixed for years. Then again, Google has made some recent promises that Wear OS is going to be receiving more focus. Time will only tell (pun intended).

As for me? It’s been a really tough decision. The Samsung watch works better in most categories, however, the Fossil watch works best with my phone. I can’t get over how much easier it is to respond to a text on the Fossil with a full- albeit microscopic- swipe keyboard on the screen (I don’t like speaking my messages, because I primarily use my watch to reply while at work, and speaking to my watch looks weird).

The Samsung’s best quality is the fitness aspect, and I need to get fit, but for my uses, it really isn’t better than the Fossil. Google Fit’s ability to link to apps like Cardiogram allow me to tailor my health data to my personal needs. Both watches offer very similar features, including work out tracking and stress relief, and while it is nice that Samsung compiles stress levels into a graph, I also have to think about how much that information really impacts my day to day life: not at all. The same goes for sleep tracking; I’ve actually found it harder to fall asleep knowing my watch is going to grade my slumber.

The biggest area for me to consider has been the battery life. When using the Fossil watch, I’ve yet to have a day where it died before my day was done, but I’ve had to charge it every day. That’s not a huge problem for me; I charge all of my devices on a daily basis. And the fact that it charges so quickly (it is charging now, and has gone from 20% to 60% in the last 15 minutes) means that it won’t be long for it to be up and running again if I do need to stop and charge it. The Samsung watch has lasted me between 2–3 days on a charge, but it takes so much longer to charge, which means I honestly haven’t charged it completely to 100% since I got it, because I don’t want to wait on it. It also means I don’t have to worry if I leave the house with it as low as 40%, as I know that will still probably get me through the rest of my day. Fossil’s granular control over what features are turned on and affecting the battery life are great, but I haven’t had to even touch any of Samsung’s features to preserve the battery.

It’s been a real struggle (first world problems at their firstiest), and honestly I very nearly went with the Fossil watch simply because of the better compatibility with my phone, the more useful apps, and the faster charging time, despite the shorter battery life. But then, as if I needed a nudge in the other direction, the Fossil watch stopped vibrating or making sounds for notification alerts. As much as I like this watch, with every passing day another quirk shows up that keeps me from wanting to use this watch. So, reluctantly, the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 is the watch I’ve chosen to wear. But I really, really hope Google works out all of the kinks with Wear OS, because it’s a platform I’m very interested in using down the road.

I hope this in-depth look at two of Android’s better smartwatch offerings helps you make the decision that is right for you.