Samsung launched the Galaxy Watch Active alongside the S10 earlier this year, positively surprising us with a great all-round wearable product. Its the first Tizen watch to introduce Samsung’s new OneUI, which has since made its way to the other smartwatches in the company’s lineup. Now, the Active is first in line to receive another software update and with a slew of new capabilities such as a night mode, automatic swimming recognition, a new low heart rate alert, improved Bixby actions, and some general UX improvements.
Let’s get Samsung’s voice assistant everyone loves to hate out of the way first. It now lets you start customized exercise routines with specific goals and gives you the long-awaited ability to ask for the time differences between cities. The update should also make it easier to control SmartThings devices and change system settings such as brightness.
Proceeding to UI improvements, Tizen gets a new Goodnight Mode, which turns off the display at night and shows you a dedicated watch face with the press of a button. You can turn off notifications altogether while in this mode, or you can customize which notifications you’d still like to receive.
The App Tray has been updated to remove the dial-inspired interface, offering you horizontal swipes through pages of apps instead. With the Watch Active not having a rotating bezel, this makes sense.
On the fitness front, the watch adds automatic swimming recognition to the existing six activities it could detect before. Additionally, you can now set up custom low heart rate alerts alongside the existing high warnings. If your pulse is abnormal for more than 10 minutes, you’ll receive a notification. The breathing guide also received some minor UX updates and should help you calm down more efficiently.
You can take a look at the full changelog for this update below:
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