Which is the better smartwatch?

• Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro

  Samsung’s Pro wearable

  The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro improves upon the regular versions of the wearable with a larger screen, longer battery and adventuring features. As a result, it’s Samsung’s priciest wearable to date.

  Pros

  • Three-day battery
  • Premium look and design
  • Runs Wear OS, meaning plenty of apps

  Cons

  • No ANT+ support
  • Questionable GPS tracking
  • Only for larger wrists

• Source: Garmin

  Garmin Forerunner 955

  The runner’s choice

  The Forerunner 955 is Garmin’s top-of-the-range sports watch. What it lacks in smartwatch flexibility, it makes up for with fitness features that athletes will love.

  Pros

  • Battery life for weeks
  • Brilliant health and fitness guidance
  • Superb exercise tracking, expandable via ANT+

  Cons

  • Utilitarian design
  • Garmin OS isn’t very flexible
  • Limited apps via Garmin IQ

With the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, Samsung has gone all in on making one of the best Android smartwatches for outdoorsy types. And while it’s undoubtedly a tough sell for those with small wrists, others will lap up the rugged design and longer battery life.

These enhancements seemingly put the Galaxy Watch into competition with Garmin’s rugged and sporty offerings. And starting at $499, the Garmin Forerunner 955 is the most obvious competitor to the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, which starts at $449. So which is right for you? Here’s how the two compare in several key areas.

Price and availability

The Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is the most expensive wearable in Samsung’s collection, priced at $449 if you’re happy with just Bluetooth connectivity, or $499 if you want LTE — useful if you like to run without your phone. The Garmin Forerunner 955, meanwhile, starts at $499 and doesn’t have an LTE option at the time of writing.

But it does have its own high-end version: the Forerunner 955 Solar. As the name suggests, it has the power to top up its built-in battery via the sun’s rays (though this isn’t intended to replace a regular charger). It costs an extra $100 at $599.

Design

Source: Garmin

While the Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro and Garmin Forerunner 955 are very different looking, one thing they do have in common is heft. Neither is a watch designed with skinny wrists in mind, at 45.4mm or 46.5mm wide and weighing in at 46g and 52g, respectively.

But that’s where the similarities end, and in terms of pure style, it’s a clear win for Samsung. As smartwatches go, it’s a looker with a clean circular design punctuated by two buttons on the right-hand side. The 1.4-inch AMOLED screen is bright and vibrant with a 450×450 resolution ensuring everything feels impossibly sharp given its relatively small screen size. The only real downside is that Samsung has decided to retire the rotating bezel from the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. That’s a pity, as it was both very satisfying to use and a good alternative to inelegantly prodding a fiddly touchscreen.

The Garmin Forerunner 955, meanwhile, is more utilitarian in design. While it has a touchscreen, navigation is chiefly managed by the five buttons surrounding the screen. Said screen is a 1.3-inch 260 x 260px transflective MIP LCD — perfectly serviceable, but nowhere near as eye-catching as Samsung’s offering.

It’s also worth flagging here that while the Forerunner 255 will work with iOS or Android, Samsung has made the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro Android only. Not only that, but some features, such as ECG and blood pressure monitoring, require a Samsung smartphone, which feels unnecessarily awkward.

Software

This is where the biggest difference between the two watches is. Crudely, the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is a smartwatch that dabbles in sports, while the Forerunner 955 is a sports watch that dabbles in smarts. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s a good way of prioritizing what’s important to you.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro runs Google’s Wear OS, which means that you’re spoiled for choice in terms of apps and customization options. It also means plenty of built-in Google services, including Maps, Gmail, and Google Assistant. It also lets you use Google Pay or Samsung Pay for contactless payments from the wrist. The Forerunner 955 can make contactless payments, too, but only via Garmin Pay, which fewer banks support, especially outside the United States.

The Forerunner 955’s software is considerably less flexible, laser focused on health and fitness as you’d expect. You can change your watch face, and add additional apps via the Garmin IQ store, but there aren’t a huge number available, and that doesn’t look like it will changing any time soon. It gets notifications, but you can’t respond to them from your watch.

That said, the Garmin Connect app is one of the best around, with ridiculous amounts of exercise data to pore over. By comparison, Samsung Health is considerably more basic, and it still doesn’t have a web version, meaning you have to do all of your analysis on your phone.

Health and fitness

Source: Garmin

What the Garmin Forerunner 955 lacks in style and flexible software, it more than makes up for in terms of sports tracking, which is second to none. As well as tracking everything from Pickleball to Bouldering, the GPS is fast to connect and incredibly reliable. Not sold on GPS? The watch also supports GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDuo and QZSS, so you can get a lock on wherever you are.

But that’s only scratching the surface of the Forerunner 955’s dedication to health and fitness, with all kinds of features, including reports to tell you how hard to train, based on your sleep and energy levels. There’s also Stamina (which tells you how much energy you have left during a given workout), PacePro (which advises on pace to match your elevation), and a race widget, which counts down to a scheduled race with your predicted performance based on your training and body metrics. It will even tell you what weather to expect on the big day.

Finally, and most importantly to serious athletes, the Garmin Forerunner 955 supports ANT+ — a wireless protocol used in lots of exercise accessories like footpods and chest straps. In other words, the Forerunner 955 makes it easy for those who want even more data to get it.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, on the other hand (or wrist), doesn’t support ANT+, and is more aimed at adventurers than athletes. While it tracks over 90 types of exercise, it feels like more of an afterthought, and GPS readings are sometimes questionable.

However, Samsung’s 3-in-1 BioActive sensor — which combines heart rate, SpO2, body composition and temperature — isn’t without its charms for more general wellness insights. You can even use the watch to take an electrocardiogram or measure your blood pressure — though the latter needs calibration via a dedicated cuff, and both require a Samsung phone to use.

For the Pro model, Samsung has introduced GPX maps, but at the time of writing, this only works for cycling and hiking.

Battery life

Since moving away from its Tizen operating system and onto Wear OS, battery life has been a bit of an Achille’s heel of Samsung’s smartwatches. But the company has corrected this with the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, equipping it with a mammoth 590mAh cell. This will give you up to 80 hours of use, or 20 if you have GPS enabled for all that time.

That’s a decent time for a Wear OS smartwatch, but the Forerunner 955 easily has it beat with a battery life that can be measured in days rather than hours. You can expect up to 15 days in smartwatch mode, or 42 hours of GPS activity.

These figures are bumped to an average of 20 and 49 hours if you opt for the solar mode (assuming decent exposure to 50,000 lux light).

Which is right for you?

While in terms of pricing and rugged branding, the Garmin Forerunner 955 and Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro appear to be quite similar products, they’re actually aimed at different markets. One is a smartwatch that moonlights as a sports watch, while the other is a sports watch with some smart functionality. Dedicated athletes will love how seriously the Garmin Forerunner 955 treats fitness tracking, both on the watch and in the Garmin Connect app. But its looks are on the plain side, and it’s not hugely flexible as wearables go, offering basic notifications and a limited app store beyond its sporting core.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, meanwhile, is a wonderful smartwatch, but somewhat less convincing as a fitness tracker, both in terms of accuracy and analysis. But it’ll look stylish whether running or in the office, and it offers plenty of customization options for those that want to dig into Wear OS.

Both are on the pricey side, of course, and you may decide that cheaper products from both companies suit you better. The basic Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 starts at $280, while the Garmin Forerunner 255 comes in at $349. Both are pretty fully featured wearables, and you may decide to save a few bucks and opt for one of them instead.

Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro improves upon the regular versions of the wearable with a larger screen, longer battery and adventuring features. As a result, it’s Samsung’s priciest wearable to date.

Source: Garmin

Garmin Forerunner 955

The Forerunner 955 is Garmin’s top-of-the-range sports watch. What it lacks in smartwatch flexibility, it makes up for with fitness features that athletes will love.