Samsung highlighted improvements to sleep tracking, which now offers an in-depth analysis of your sleep score to better help you understand exactly what the data is telling you. It has also partnered with the National Sleep Foundation to send out more “individualized Sleep Messages” that give you more feedback every morning, and a new Sleep Consistency tool shows you how consistent your sleep and wake times are, along with a Sleep Animal Symbol to represent your sleep type, something Google and Fitbit introduced on the Pixel Watch. This is all paired with an enhanced Sleep Coaching system, which gives you more actions to take to get better rest.
As for fitness, there are new personalized heart rate zones you can utilize for your workouts, a Custom Workout tool to track your own routine, and now irregular heart rhythm notifications. The Watch6 series can also track skin temperature (ahem, like the Apple Watch Series 8), and Samsung claims this can provide useful insights for anyone tracking their period.
Both watches are available for preorder now and go on sale on August 11. The Watch6 starts at $300 for the 40-mm model and $330 for the 44-mm version. The Watch6 Classic is $400 for the 43-mm model and $430 for the larger 47-mm size.
Iterative Year
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
These are all, from my limited time handling the hardware, fine upgrades over their predecessors. There’s not much to get excited about, save for the larger screen on the Flip5, which makes it genuinely more usable in its folded state. However, I’d have liked to see Samsung make headway in bringing the cost down for its folding phones so they’re more accessible in their fifth generation. They’re still too expensive for most people.
The tablets are also expensive, especially since you have to shell out for a separate keyboard cover. Unlike Apple and its iPad Air or base iPad, Samsung doesn’t have any fanfare for its budget slates (they exist); I’d have liked to see the company tote out a sub-$500 tablet here and get people excited about it. Maybe another time.
For the watches, I’m mostly looking at battery life. The combination of Wear OS 4 and more efficient chipset should mean a longer-lasting battery, but Samsung’s claim of up to 40 hours of operation (with the always-on display mode turned off), is lower than what it claimed with last year’s Watch5 series. None of these new watches have anything close to the beefy battery that was in the Watch5 Pro, so I’m expecting to be disappointed. We’ll be gearing up to test all the new hardware over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.