Samsung Galaxy Watch9 Review – Refined Android Smartwatch Tested

The  2026 successor to last year’s Galaxy Watch8 series, the new Galaxy Watch9 launched alongside the new Galaxy Z Fold8, Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra and Galaxy Z Flip8. After taking it for a spin over the past several weekends, here’s our Samsung Galaxy Watch9 review where we share our findings on whether their latest smartwatch is worth the money.

Samsung Galaxy Watch9 Review – Performance

Getting our Galaxy Watch9 review sample paired up and running was a simple task especially if you already use a Samsung phone and it paired up with a Galaxy Z Fold8 via the preinstalled Wearable app in seconds. Like other smartwatches, the Galaxy Watch9 is able to take notifications and calls off a paired smartphone which can come in handy if your hands are otherwise occupied.

Featuring the new Snapdragon Wear Elite processor, the Galaxy Watch9 runs Android Wear OS 7 with their own One UI 9 Watch interface. Apps are sourced off Google’s own Play Store. This means you get access to Google Maps, Gmail, Google Gemini and, via Samsung’s own browser app, access to YouTube and web browsing too if the idea of watching videos and navigating websites on a 1.47-inch display floats your boat. Google’s various apps look and feel particularly smooth, functioning seamlessly without bugs or any noticeable slow down. 

On paper, Samsung has announced that the Galaxy Watch9 will enjoy five years of OS and security upgrades through to 2031 which is excellent as smartwatches go but not as robust as the 7-year policy they offer for their phones.

The Galaxy Watch9 also features the Raise to Talk feature that lets you raise your wrist and verbally interact with the aforementioned Google Gemini to answer the usual trivia as well as interact with selected Samsung and Google apps. However, this feature doesn’t trigger reliably all the time during our testing period and it’s easier to simply hold down the Home button to summon Gemini for more consistent results. 

In terms of health and fitness tracking, the Galaxy Watch9 offers the usual sleep tracking, step counting, heart-rate monitoring, electrocardiogram (ECG), blood-pressure monitoring and body composition measurements, alongside a wide range of workout modes.

It also expands Samsung Health with several new tools designed to make these metrics easier to understand, including Vitals, Energy Score, Heart Health Score, Daily Cardio Load and Fitness Index. Also retained from the previous Galaxy Watch8 is the advanced glycation end products (AGEs) index tracking feature that helps to track your metabolic health and biological aging.

Unfortunately, the Galaxy Watch9 needs to be paired with a Samsung phone to gain access to its ECG and blood pressure monitoring functionality though phones from other Android different brands can still use most of its other features.

The Vitals dashboard gives you an overview of your key health metrics at a glance by combining heart rate, heart-rate variability (HRV), respiratory rate, skin temperature and blood oxygen levels. The watch needs at least seven nights of sleep data to establish an initial baseline before it can identify meaningful deviations from your normal readings.

The Heart Health Score provides a daily snapshot of cardiovascular health based on lifestyle factors including sleep, BMI, vascular load and  physical activity. To be clear, it isn’t a medical diagnostic tool but is intended to give users an understandable overview of how their everyday activities and habits are affecting their heart health.

For Daily Cardio Load, the Galaxy Watch9 collates activity and heart rate data to assess accumulated cardiovascular strain and help suggest appropriate training and recovery periods. Fitness Index, meanwhile, combines metrics including VO2 Max, body composition, heart rate, steps and activity data to provide an overall picture of your current fitness level and suggest personalised goals.

You also get a unique Hearing Protection mode that uses the built-in mic to measure ambient noise levels and warns you accordingly if the area around you gets too loud to either scarper or wear protection to protect your hearing.

Combined, these new features offer a richer picture of your health and how your daily activities or lack thereof contribute towards it. 

In terms of fitness tracking, the Galaxy Watch9 is able to automatically track running, walking and swimming and also has options for a host of other sports including American football and other racket sports though, oddly, it lacks any tracking for pickleball.

Combined, the various features on the Galaxy Watch9 make it ideal for casual fitness enthusiasts, with an emphasis on running, general wellbeing and recovery rather than being a specialised smartwatch for specific sports or serious athletes.

With all the bells and whistles turned on, our Galaxy Watch9 review sample helped to effectively track all the usual health and sleep metrics efficiently and when compared to a Galaxy Watch8 Classic, offered similar results across multiple metrics. What came in particularly useful was its dual-frequency GPS route tracking and across several test runs, it was able to track my rather roundabout route walking across downtown Kuala Lumpur between several malls. 

While immensely insightful, getting all these health and tracking modes activated and running is a chore as you have to go through the various settings with a fine-toothed comb to activate multiple opt-in sliders and permissions to obtain full functionality. 

When tested, the display on our Galaxy Watch9 review unit proved to be highly responsive to touch input including the use of its virtual bezel by touching the edges of the screen. It also offered excellent clarity even under direct sunlight thanks to its peak brightness of 3,000 nits. 

In terms of battery life, our Galaxy Watch9 review sample at full charge, with the Always On Display activated, phone notifications enabled and the full array of health and fitness tracking options turned on, comfortably lasted around a day and a half. This is respectable for a Wear OS smartwatch but isn’t a radical improvement over its predecessor, despite the larger battery and more efficient Snapdragon chipset.

Your mileage will vary if you perform extensive workouts outdoors with GPS tracking on and have all the aforementioned health and fitness tracking options turned on along with the display set to Always On. However, if you nix all these and minimise notifications, you can eke out slightly longer endurance. While this typically isn’t a problem for the usual work week, you’ll likely have to bring the charging cable out with you if you’re going on an extended weekend trip lasting beyond a couple of days.

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy Watch9?

The Samsung Galaxy Watch9 is a stylish and well-built smartwatch that combines strong everyday performance with one of the most comprehensive health and wellness feature sets available on an Android smartwatch. Its comfortable design, bright display, responsive performance and improved health tracking make it particularly well suited to users who want a smartwatch for everyday activity, sleep and general fitness rather than specialised athletic training.

While the higher-end Galaxy Watch Ultra2 takes the limelight with its tougher titanium construction, greater water resistance, larger display and more extensive outdoor-focused capabilities, the Galaxy Watch9 retains most of the health features that make Samsung’s latest wearables compelling while being lighter, smaller and more affordable.

Its relatively modest battery gains and the loss of phone-based PowerShare charging are notable drawbacks, but neither undermines what remains one of the strongest mainstream Android smartwatches available in 2026.

Specifications

Price RM1,599 (44mm, Bluetooth), RM1,899 (44mm, LTE) | RM1,499 (40mm, Bluetooth), RM1,799 (40mm, LTE)
Display 1.47-inch Super AMOLED (44mm), 480 x 480 pixels | 1.34-inch Super AMOLED (40mm), 438 x 438 pixels, 3,000 nits peak brightness
Processor Snapdragon Wear Elite
Memory 2GB RAM/ 32GB storage
OS Android Wear OS 7 w/ One UI 9
Battery 445mAh (44mm) | 390mAh (40mm)
Size/Weight 46 x 43.7 x 8.6mm / 34g [44mm] | 42.7 x 40.4 x 8.6mm /32g [40mm]

Samsung Galaxy Watch9 review sample courtesy of Samsung Malaysia. For more details please visit https://www.samsung.com/my/watches/galaxy-watch9/buy/