From early this week, Samsung’s latest smartwatches, the Galaxy Watch 5 and Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, are available for purchase in the Kenyan market.
“The Galaxy Watch5 enhances the features that consumers rely on every day, while the Galaxy Watch5 Pro – the newest addition to the Galaxy Watch lineup – is Samsung’s most durable and feature-packed watch yet,” a statement Samsung sent to us at the time reads.
The two smartwatches bring with them several new features while building on the features that Samsung had introduced in past smartwatches. For instance, the BioActive sensor that Samsung introduced into its Watch series with the Watch 4 for accurate heart rate, blood oxygen level, and even stress level readings, stays on and pairs up with the newly-introduced temperature sensor to make the Samsung Galaxy Watch series come full circle as far as desired features go.
As we’d earlier noted, when the two smartwatches were unveiled alongside the latest Samsung foldables last month, the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is the superior of the two devices.
The Galaxy Watch 5 Pro has a beefier 590mAh battery, 13% larger than the unit on the last generation of Samsung smartwatches. Samsung says that, as a result, the Watch 5 Pro should go for up to 3 days or 80 hours of usage on a single charge. Even better, an 8-minute drop on the watch’s wireless charger before one sleeps results in them getting at least 8 hours of sleep tracking.
Unlike the Galaxy Watch 5 which has two watch display sizes to choose from (40 and 44mm), the Watch 5 Pro has only one size: 45mm. The difference in the sizes of the Galaxy Watch 5 also means differences in the sizes of their batteries. The 44mm variant gets a 410mAh battery unit and the 40mm makes do with a 284mAh battery.
“The rotating bezel, which is a darling of many like yours truly on the Galaxy Watch 3, where it made a return after a brief hiatus missing in action and being mimicked by software on the Active watch models, is missing on the Galaxy Watch 5 and Watch 5 Pro. Instead, the Watch 5 Pro has a design element that might cheat the eye that something of that nature exists only to realize that it’s just a concave bezel that has no functionality beyond just looking good – and consoling those of us who love the rotating bezel,” we noted at launch.
Both watches have the same 5nm Exynos W920 chipset, 1.5GB RAM, and 16GB internal storage.
Both watches run on One UI Watch 4.5 which is based on Wear OS 3.5 thanks to the Samsung-Google partnership that saw the former abandon its Tizen operating system for the latter’s wearables platform while bringing whatever worked well on Tizen to Wear OS. As a result, several Google-centric features like the Google Assistant, can be accessed on both smartwatches. For instance, users can request the Assistant to play their favourite songs on Spotify and, in an update that is expected later on, be able to get directions on Google Maps even when their phones are nowhere near.
The Galaxy Watch 5 is going for Kshs 37,000 while the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro costs Kshs 52,000.
