Samsung’s rival to the Apple Watch Ultra 3, the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is a rugged wearable packing all the everyday tools you’d expect from a top-tier smartwatch. It’s serious about fitness, too, with the firepower to boss daily workouts and tackle bigger challenges, from Hyrox and road marathons to trail ultras and scuba dives. Beyond training, it features a comprehensive suite of health-tracking tools to help you build healthier everyday habits.
This latest incarnation is built tough, with accuracy-boosting dual-band GPS, a bigger battery and the brightest screen in the business. With new trail-running and scuba modes, additional heart-health insights, cardio-load monitoring and daily health-vitals tracking, there’s enough here to rival the best smartwatches.
But is this now the super-powered fitness smartwatch you need on your wrist? We put it to the test to find out.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2: Price and specsSamsung Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra2, 47 mm, LTE Connectivity, Titanium Grey
Samsung Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra2, 47 mm, LTE Connectivity, Titanium Grey
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 comes in two colours – Titanium Silver and Titanium Grey – and it’ll set you back £649. It’s cheaper than the Apple Watch Ultra 3 (£749) and top-tier dedicated sports watches such as the Garmin Fenix 8 AMOLED (£749). But it’s more than double the price of the new Galaxy Watch 9, which starts at £319 for the smaller 40mm edition.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2: What’s new?
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 has some standout updates. It now packs a large, impressively bright 1.52-inch display with 5,000-nit brightness. It’s the brightest display you’ll find on any smartwatch, protected by a toughened sapphire crystal lens and housed in a sleeker-looking titanium frame that survived two weeks of bodyboarding, sea swimming and trail running without a scuff in sight.
At 10.7mm, it’s 12% thinner than the first-gen Ultra. But even though everything – including the softer strap – is more wrist-friendly than its predecessor, it’s still among the chunkier smartwatches and is likely to feel bulky on smaller wrists. There are more comfortable watches to wear 24/7, particularly in bed.
Staying power has been boosted with a bigger-capacity battery that stretches to multi-day use. A faster processor speeds effortlessly through tasks, powering convenient features such as Raise to Speak, which lets you summon Gemini AI to answer quick voice queries – weather, reminders, timers, general questions – simply by raising the watch to your mouth. Dead handy during sweaty workouts.
Health and sleep tracking
Kieran Alger
The Watch Ultra 2 offers an impressive array of tools to track your health and lifestyle, including the usual suspects such as sleep, activity and heart rate, all powered by Samsung’s BioActive Sensor. It handles heart-rate tracking with good reliability, supports ECG tracking and conducts bioelectrical impedance analysis to estimate your body composition – a bit like your smart scales, but from the wrist.
The watch lets you keep tabs on everything from your Energy Score – a bit like Garmin’s Body Battery – HRV and sleep consistency to vascular load, blood pressure and even antioxidant levels. It’ll spot sleep apnoea, log snoring episodes via your phone’s mic and let you take ECG and blood-oxygen readings. Throw in menstrual-cycle predictions and you’ve got one of the most extensive health suites available on a smartwatch.
Samsung has also added a handy one-stop Vitals feature. Billed as an ‘intelligent early warning system’, this spots when you deviate from your baseline for key health signals including heart-rate variability (HRV), respiratory rate, skin temperature, heart rate and blood-oxygen levels. It then offers advice to help you get back on track.
The new Heart Health tool crunches vascular load, average sleep time, vigorous activity and BMI into one simple score that charts your cardiovascular health. Log too much high-intensity activity and not enough sleep and you’ll get a nudge to pay closer attention. For someone who’s potentially guilty of overtraining, I found this a helpful little safety net.
Fitness and workout tracking
With 100+ sports modes, plus automatic tracking for walking, running, cycling, rowing, swimming and the elliptical, the Watch Ultra 2 covers most of your workout needs. Most of the core metrics are covered for individual training sessions, too, including VO2 max estimates, running-form metrics and heart-rate zones. It’ll even estimate the carbs and fat you’ve burned and your sweat loss.
The addition of Daily Cardio Load tracking now brings Samsung more in line with dedicated sports watches. This spots when you’re active at moderate to vigorous intensity, not just when you’ve manually started a workout on the watch. The higher and longer your heart rate is elevated, the more it adds to your cardio load, while a colour-graded scale shows whether you’re managing your training intensity and volume well or potentially overdoing it.
A new Fitness Index readout also benchmarks your strength, flexibility, cardio, endurance and body composition against others in your age range. Though exactly how it estimates some of these is a bit woolly.
However, you don’t quite get the deeper, more targeted level of longer-term training insights you might find on more capable Garmin and COROS watches.
Off-gridders will appreciate the new trail-running mode, which tracks elevation and ascent and reveals how the terrain you’re tackling is affecting your effort levels and performance. There’s also a dedicated scuba-diving app that launches automatically when you hit the water, recording real-time depth, dive duration and water temperature.
When it comes to GPS accuracy, I had a bit of a mixed bag. For most of my regular runs and rides, it matched my Garmin Forerunner 970 for overall distance. But I raced a half marathon where the Watch Ultra 2 came up short, logging 20.36km while my Garmin clocked 21.17km.
Display, design and usability
Kieran Alger
The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 display sets the benchmark for smartwatch screens. It’s impressively bright and pin-sharp, and I found it easy to read in all conditions, even in the direct sunlight of a UK summer heatwave.
It’s generally an easy watch to navigate. The three physical buttons and touchscreen controls are snappy and responsive.
There are decent levels of customisation, including the neat, time-saving Action button, which you can set to jump straight to your workout of choice, launch your phone’s camera controls or fire up the screen-based torch. Other tricks include pinch and knock gesture controls that let you quickly answer calls or launch exercise modes without touching the screen.
However, I would appreciate a scrolling digital crown to make it easier to use on the move, cutting out the need for mid-workout, sweaty-finger swiping.
One more gripe: a lot of the features need ‘setting up’. There’s a fair bit of pratting about in the app to get everything tracking. I just wanted it firing from day one.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 battery life
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 packs a bigger-capacity battery, some of which gets gobbled up by that brighter, more power-hungry screen. Even so, Samsung says it should stretch to 60 hours.
And in my tests, it lived up to its billing. With the screen set to Always On and using adaptive brightness, I found myself charging the watch every three days or so, including an hour of GPS-tracked training each day. That won’t rival your average Garmin, but it’s impressive for a smartwatch.
A one-hour run or ride burned around 7%. Pumping the display up to maximum brightness rinses the battery much faster, but I never found I needed that punchiest screen level. And if you’re happy to tweak some settings, you can definitely eke out more.
Smartwatch features
When it comes to smartwatch tools, the Watch Ultra 2 has everything you’d expect from a top-tier wearable: calls and messaging, contactless payments, offline music, an AI-powered voice assistant and a comprehensive selection of third-party apps. I didn’t find anything lacking here.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2: VerdictSamsung Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra2, 47 mm, LTE Connectivity, Titanium GreySamsung Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra2, 47 mm, LTE Connectivity, Titanium Grey
With its comprehensive suite of health-tracking smarts, a strong selection of fitness tools, excellent smartwatch battery life and that killer-bright screen, the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is a significant improvement over the last-gen watch and an excellent blend of smartwatch and sports watch.
It doesn’t quite have the targeted training and fitness-tracking chops of the best Garmin or COROS sports watches. But for paid-up Samsung owners and Android users looking for a balance of life-taming tools and health and fitness insights in a more adventure-ready design, this is an excellent option.
That said, if you don’t need the extra ruggedness or bigger battery – or simply want something more compact – the Galaxy Watch 9 might literally be a better fit, with many of the same features.
And if you’re not too bothered about the screen upgrades or the new trail-running and scuba modes, it might also be worth sitting tight for the inevitable price drops on the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra.