We’ve asked Apple for comment on the issue, although watchOS 7.0.1 doesn’t appear to have addressed the glitches. Newer watches (including this author’s Series 5) don’t appear to be affected. It’s also unclear if the problems affect Series 3 watches bought directly from Apple with watchOS 7 already installed.

There’s a good chance this will be patched in an upcoming release. Even so, it’s not a great experience for owners of a device that’s still considered current.

OS 5.0 includes a new interface navigation method and an interface with tweaks that take advantage of the higher-resolution screens, such as a new font and improved graphics. It can run older apps, although they’ll have to run in a compatibility mode.

The cutoff isn’t completely surprising given the scale of the update. Even so, it’s not a thrilling prospect if you own an earlier Fitbit smartwatch. Your device’s software might already be somewhat obsolete after just a year — while it’ll work as originally intended, you won’t get a steady stream of new features like you might from Apple, Google (while it waits to acquire Fitbit) or Samsung.

If you don’t mind the shape, you’ll be happy to find comprehensive fitness-tracking features that Garmin’s fans love. These include sleep and constant heart rate monitoring, a blood oxygen saturation sensor, abnormal heart rate alerts, stress tracking and more. The Music Edition ($250) will also offer onboard storage for your tunes, so you can go on a run without your phone and still enjoy music in your earbuds.

The 1.3-inch Gorilla Glass touchscreen and aluminum bezel make for a pleasant aesthetic, even if it is a little basic and familiar. Compared to the Venu, the Sq doesn’t have a barometer or gyro sensors, so elevation is calculated with its GPS sensor. This means you won’t be able to use the Sq to track your floors climbed or total ascent. You’ll also miss the workout animations and live watch faces that the original Venu supports.

Still, for $200, the Venu Sq offers plenty of features that you’ll find on pricier competitors like the Fitbit Sense, Apple Watch and Galaxy Watch. Garmin is not the best at smartwatch features like notifications or apps (nor at timely responses when data breaches happen), but those who want a great fitness tracker and don’t need sophisticated smartwatch tools might find the Venu Sq compelling.

Nike

The app also promises “fresh” content and art for the quick start button, Guided Runs and other watch face complications.

This could be an important update. While Nike Run Club already offered badges and encouragement from your friends, this promotes a regular schedule no matter what your fellow runners are doing. That, in turn, could help you stick to fitness goals and turn running into more of a habit.

Fitbit’s $329 Sense smartwatch just earned clearance from the FDA (and the EU’s regulatory body) for its electrocardiogram (ECG) app. When the “advanced health” wearable arrives this October, it will be able to assess heart rhythms for atrial fibrillation, or AFib.

AFib is a heart condition that affects more than 33.5 million people globally and has serious complications, including stroke. The condition is notoriously difficult to detect because the heart doesn’t always present an abnormal rhythm when a patient is in their doctor’s office. A study used to evaluate Fitbit’s algorithm found that it could detect 98.7 percent of AFib cases.

The Galaxy Watch 3’s allure starts with the relatively thin and light size, though it’s still a bit chunky on the underside. It also has an improved rotating bezel that’s not only smaller, but operates more smoothly than before.

The Watch 3 really shines when it comes to the sleep and fitness tracking side. It comes with a built-in running coach that provides real-time audio and visual feedback for free, unlike the subscription services offered on devices like the Fitbit. It can also effectively monitor your sleep, showing exactly when you wake up and fall asleep again, and giving you a score for each sleep session.

You also fancy health readings like VO2Max, Sp02 and even trip detection (similar to Apple’s fall detection). And of course, it’s a great smartphone companion, letting you easily reply to messages, control music and more.

With all of these features and an OS that works smoothly (unlike wearOS, at times), the Galaxy Watch 3 normally commands a pretty high price. If you’ve been looking to snag one, a $65 discount might be just the incentive you need.

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The smartwatch plans OnePlus shelved years ago could be back on the table, 9to5Google reports. 91Mobiles spotted a listing on the IMDA website for a “OnePlus Watch.” Beyond the model number, W301GB, we don’t know much, but there are a few reasons a smartwatch from OnePlus would make sense. 

Several years ago, OnePlus CEO Carl Pei said the company was working on its own smartwatch. In 2016, he shared sketches on Twitter, but by that point, the company had scrapped plans to develop the wearable. It seems that the company thought it was overstretching, so it killed a bunch of non-phone projects. Flash forward to today: OnePlus has wireless earbuds and TVs — a smartwatch seems a lot more feasible.

Coros Wearables has revealed what it claims is the lightest GPS running watch on the market. The Pace 2 Sport weighs just 29.7 grams with the nylon band — just over two grams lighter than Garmin’s Forerunner 45S. For competitive runners looking for any edge they can get while still tracking their sessions, it might be worth paying attention to.

The latest model has a processor that’s one and a half times as powerful as the one in the original Pace, and there’s four times more storage (64MB). It’ll last for up to 30 hours on a full charge while using the GPS functions and up to twice as long on the UltraMax mode. Otherwise, the Pace 2 can run for up to 20 days with daily use of features like heart rate monitoring, along with sleep and step tracking.

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I was a little worried when my colleague Chris Velazco came back from an early hands-on demo session saying that the Watch 3’s rotating bezel was lighter and smaller than the original’s and that it didn’t clunk into each notch as definitively as before. But I was relieved when I used the wheel myself. It’s a lot lighter and smaller, yes, and it glides past each notch more smoothly than before. But it doesn’t spin freely; there’s enough resistance that you have to be fairly deliberate when twisting it from one notch to the next. If the original Galaxy Watch’s bezel moved like the Big Wheel on The Price Is Right, the Watch 3’s feels more like the whizzing spinner on Wheel Of Fortune.

In between the rotating bezel and the 1.2-inch display sits a ring of small carvings for five-, 10- and 15-minute marks. It’s not a particularly helpful design flourish, especially since a regular watch would have “1, 2, 3,” to show the hours rather than the “05, 10, 15” here. Still, it’s nice to look at. Besides, the alternatives from the Apple Watch and Fitbit Versa 2 are more basic designs and squarish faces, neither of which I really care for.

Health, sleep and fitness tracking

Most of the Galaxy Watch 3’s new features revolve around making it a better health and fitness companion. The upcoming ECG tool and new blood pressure readings, could help provide more insight to your overall health. But these are pending a software update and regulatory approval in the latter case, so I wasn’t able to test them for this review. 

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

One of the updates that I could try was the new running coach. Samsung is not the first company to provide real-time audio and visual feedback on your jog, but the latest wearables from Apple, Fitbit and Garmin don’t. Plus, Samsung is doing it for free, which is rare. Fitbit’s Coach service requires a subscription fee, for example.

After selecting a goal from options like “light running,” “calorie burning” and “speed endurance,” you can start your run. In “light” mode, I was guided through four stages at gradually increasing speeds. The watch buzzed and told me to either slow down or speed up to hit the targets. When I met and stayed within the recommended range, the coach would tell me I was doing well, with on-screen graphics to match. 

Every so often, too, the watch would say things like “Great pace, keep up this pace,” or “Think positively, you’re getting closer to your goal with every step.” It’s meant to be encouraging but, when delivered in its very robotic voice, it feels a little creepy. Plus, sometimes it would say weird things like, “Can you feel yourself working hard? What does it feel like?” and “Are you feeling well enough for exercise today?” That last one made me wonder if the watch detected some kind of anomaly and that maybe I shouldn’t work out, but it was just asking an impersonal question, not making a targeted observation.

The Watch 3 shows more comprehensive analysis for runs than for other workouts. In addition to the usual average heart rate, session duration and calories burned, you’ll see feedback on your symmetry, contact time, flight time, stiffness and regularity, with advice on what areas you need to improve. You’ll get more guidance like suggested drills and charts showing your cadence and pace when you view your session in the Samsung Health app on your phone. I’m not a hardcore runner so this information isn’t super useful to me, but exacting athletes will likely appreciate the extra data.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

I may not be an expert in exercising but I’m basically an Olympic gold medalist when it comes to sleeping. Samsung updated the Watch 3’s sleep tracking to use the heart rate monitor and accelerometer data. This is a very similar approach to Fitbit, and uses the info to estimate how much time you spent in zones like REM, light sleep or deep sleep. It can also log how much time you spent awake. Samsung will assign you a score after tallying the time you spent asleep and also monitoring other factors like restlessness.

I had a terrible night drifting in and out of sleep before being awakened at 6:45 AM by a delivery person. When I looked at my watch later, I was unsurprised to see the Watch 3 had recorded four separate sleep sessions for the night, each period corresponding with times I had woken up. I don’t know all the exact times, but the watch accurately matched one instance when I remember noticing the sun was beginning to rise. Samsung scored each of these sessions between 30 and 40 (out of 100), which makes sense since they were all only about an hour long. 

According to the watch, I barely spent any time in the restorative “deep sleep” zone, instead mostly hanging around light and REM sleep. There’s no real way to tell if Samsung is accurate in detecting these zones, but the Watch 3 so far matches my experience. With this, Samsung joins Fitbit in offering more insight on your sleep than Apple, even with the watchOS 7 beta that has yet to publicly roll out. The Apple Watch will log the amount of time you were asleep and note interruptions, but won’t tell you what zones you were in, which would paint a better picture of sleep quality.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Your overall wellbeing isn’t just about exercise and sleep. Tizen OS health-tracking continues to outshine Wear OS and Fitbit OS. It offers helpful widgets for logging your food and water intake, and while I’m dubious on the accuracy of its stress-tracking tool, it at least offers some guided breathing exercises to help you relax. I especially like that when the Watch 3 notices you haven’t moved in an hour, it’ll not only prompt you to get up and move, but also suggest some easy exercises you can do at your desk. Plus, when I accepted one of these recommendations and did a set of five torso twists, the Watch gave an onscreen graphic of how to do the action and tracked every single rep accurately. No other smartwatch offers this. 

I like a lot of things about Samsung’s software, but I wish its heart rate monitor were faster. It takes 10 to 13 seconds to deliver a reading, at which point impatience has seemingly driven my pulse up. This could also affect its ability to keep up when monitoring your cardio zones during a workout. That said, it’s worth clarifying that, for obvious reasons, I wasn’t able to constantly keep an eye on the watch while exercising. In contrast, the Fitbit Versa 2 and the Apple Watch generally take about five seconds to produce a reading.

Blood oxygen readings and fall detection

Although Samsung added some new tools to make the Watch 3 a more robust fitness companion, it still feels better suited for more casual users than competitive athletes. New stats like VO2Max give more insight into your body’s performance during a workout, while blood oxygen (SpO2) readings are sometimes called the “fifth vital” metric by which to assess your health. (The first four are your pulse, temperature, blood pressure and respiratory rate.) These are helpful in specific circumstances but not of much use to the average person.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Samsung just released a software update that allows you to get SpO2 readings on the Watch 3, and I saw results between 98 and 99 percent. The Watch 3 interface showed me that this was on the extreme right end of a spectrum, but there was no other way to understand what that meant. Was I healthy? How did I rank against other people my age and gender? I always appreciate more data, but I had to go to Google to make sense of it. Thankfully, my result is typical (above 95 percent is normal, and you should see a doctor if you get something lower).

The Galaxy Watch 3 also offers a feature that we first saw on an Apple Watch: trip detection. It’s basically Apple’s fall detection, except Samsung went with a different name. The Galaxy Watch 3 will notice if you’ve fallen while you’re in motion, not when you’re still, and it will send an SOS message with your location to up to four designated contacts. 

I deliberately hurled myself onto a yoga mat a few times, but never triggered the system. I even fell a couple times during my workouts, but the Watch 3 didn’t register them, possibly because I was tracking my exercise. I can’t safely test this feature to see if it will work in life-threatening situations, but at least you don’t have to wait till the Watch 3 determines you’ve fallen to get help. You can also push the home button on the side three times to call your emergency contacts and share your location with them.