How to Set Up and Use a Samsung Galaxy Watch

Samsung Galaxy Watches run Wear OS 4 with Samsung's One UI Watch overlay on top, which gives them a polished, approachable interface. They pair with any Android phone running Android 8 or later, though some features — like blood pressure monitoring and advanced health reports — require a Samsung Galaxy phone.

Before you begin setup, make sure your phone has the Galaxy Wearable app installed. Search "Galaxy Wearable" in the Google Play Store and install it. If you have a Samsung Galaxy phone, this app may already be installed.

Turn on your Galaxy Watch by holding the side button. The watch will guide you to select a language and show a QR code or prompt to begin pairing. Open the Galaxy Wearable app on your phone and tap "Start the Journey" to pair the two devices via Bluetooth.

You will be asked to sign into your Samsung account. If you do not have one, you can create a free account during this process. The Samsung account enables cloud backup of your health data and access to the Galaxy Store for watch apps.

After setup, explore the main health features: step counting, continuous heart rate monitoring, sleep tracking (wear the watch overnight to get a sleep score), and irregular heart rhythm alerts. All of your health data is collected in the Samsung Health app on your phone, which gives you daily, weekly, and monthly views of your activity.

Samsung Pay lets you make contactless payments from your wrist — you add a debit or credit card through the Samsung Wallet app on your phone, then hold the watch near a payment terminal at checkout.

To extend battery life, the biggest drain is the always-on display. Turning it off in the watch Settings under Display typically extends battery from about 1.5 days to 2.5 days on a single charge.

Notification settings let you control which apps send alerts to your watch. This is worth spending a few minutes on — getting every notification from every app on your wrist gets old quickly. Go to Galaxy Wearable app > Watch Settings > Notifications to customize this.