A top-tier Wear OS experience for less than half the price of a Pixel Watch
Samsung Galaxy Watch 4
The Galaxy Watch 4 may not be the newest Samsung watch around, but it’s definitely the best value if you’re wanting the most consistent Android watch experience. It has the same processor and power as the Galaxy Watch 5, but at $140, you can get it for half the price of the Watch 5 — at least until it sells out forever.
Good smartwatches can get pricey fast — some of our picks for best Wear OS smartwatches regularly go for $300, $400, or even more. But 2022 actually wasn’t a very big year for wearable advances, and most of the best watches released in the past 12 months aren’t a whole lot better than what came the year before. That’s especially true for Samsung, whose Galaxy Watch 5 is nearly identical to the Watch 4 released in 2021. The latest Samsung watches start at $280 at retail, but for Black Friday, you can get a previous-gen Galaxy Watch 4 for just $140, now that it’s gotten an extra price at Amazon. It’s 90 percent of the current-gen experience for half the price.
It’s worth noting that the $140 price is only for the Silver 40mm model at Amazon. The Pink Gold and Black 40mm are $170 and the Silver 44mm is $200 at both Amazon and Best Buy. (44mm Black and Green are sold out at Amazon and have been for over a month. All three 44mm colors are sold out at Samsung, too.) All three 40mm colors are $170 at Best Buy and Samsung, and Best Buy has the Black 44mm at $170.
Samsung will give you at least $20 for trading in an old smartwatch or fitness tracker from Samsung, Apple, Fitbit, Fossil, or Garmin, but if you have a watch to trade in, you’re much better off grabbing the Galaxy Watch 5 because that has a minimum $75 trade-in deal right now.
Why is this a good deal?
The Watch 4 has been replaced by the Watch 5 as our top Wear OS recommendation, but the Watch 4 is still a fantastic smartwatch. The Watch 4 and Watch 5 share most components, including chipset and RAM, so the day-to-day experience on each is more or less identical. That the Watch 4 — which is $140 at Amazon right now, remember — can keep up with wearables like the $350 Google Pixel Watch and the $450 Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is pretty incredible. Samsung’s also great at keeping its devices’ software up to date for years after launch.
Because of limited generation-to-generation improvements, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 is very nearly every bit as good as the newer Samsung Galaxy Watch 5. The only meaningful improvements in Samsung’s newer, pricier watch are slightly better battery life and a new sapphire crystal material covering the watch’s screen. Everything else — performance, display quality, fitness tracking, app support, you name it — is identical to the newer model. That also means the Watch 4 is a competent alternative to Google’s Pixel Watch, which is currently twice the price at $300 for Black Friday. If you’re rocking something a couple of years old and you’re on the lookout for a newer Wear OS watch, this Watch 4 deal is hard to beat.
