By giving 64GB of storage to the Apple Watch Sequence 9, the long-time Samsung rival made the lately launched Galaxy Watch 6 — with its mere 16GB of storage — look a bit dated by comparability. Not everybody wants a ton of watch storage, to be honest. However Samsung must improve its watches’ capability by the subsequent era.
With any smartwatch, a wholesome chunk of storage goes straight to the working system. WatchOS 10 at present makes use of about 7.5GB on my associate’s Apple Watch, whereas Put on OS 4 on the Galaxy Watch 6 makes use of about 10GB of storage out of the field, leaving solely 6GB left for apps, photographs, and music recordsdata.
After I reviewed the Galaxy Watch 6, this by no means impacted me. Even after including a bunch of apps and customized photograph watch faces, I nonetheless had about 5GB left. If you happen to solely use your watch to reply telephone calls, examine notifications, and observe exercises, your storage will stay largely untouched.
So what makes the 64GB Apple Watch Sequence 9 storage such a boon? It makes it a greater standalone machine as an alternative of simply an extension of your telephone.
My colleague Andrew Myrick, who owns the Galaxy Watch 5 and Apple Watch Extremely, tells me that he prefers sporting the latter to play music and podcasts over his AirPods at any time when he desires to complete chores exterior, while not having his cumbersome iPhone 14 Professional Max or Galaxy S23 Extremely in his pocket.
Apple reserves 25% of Apple Watch storage for media, so the Sequence 9 will double that partition to 16GB — equal to the complete Galaxy Watch 6 storage. If 1GB equals about 100 high-quality music recordsdata, meaning you will get properly over a thousand songs in your watch without delay, sufficient for some nice exercise or strolling playlists.
Together with your Galaxy Watch, it can save you a number of wholesome gigs of music or audiobooks, however you need to share that remaining house with any apps you need. And that is a disgrace as a result of the Galaxy Watch is a lot higher geared up for music streaming than the Apple Watch, and it additionally allows you to save music recordsdata to the watch out of your telephone.
It is a easy matter of numbers: the Galaxy Watch 6 lasts 40 hours per cost, whereas the Apple Watch Sequence 8 has the identical 18-hour max as the previous few generations. Apple’s battery estimate web page claims the Watch Sequence 9 helps “as much as 11 hours” of native music playback, however contemplate me skeptical you will hit that quantity in regular use circumstances. With the Galaxy Watch 6, I am extra optimistic I can stream music for hours to my wi-fi earbuds and nonetheless have some capability left over.
Each Apple and Samsung promote mobile variations of their watches, letting you stream your playlists remotely. However I’ve heard horror tales about how shortly music streaming burns by way of any smartwatch’s battery, to not point out any information limits in your mobile plan. I might nonetheless want arduous storage for any phone-free excursions, and that is the place the Apple Watch wins.
Up till lately, Android smartwatches have not supplied a lot cupboard space; 8GB was a reasonably frequent commonplace. However up to now 12 months, the Pixel Watch and TicWatch Professional 5 each jumped to 32GB. Samsung, because the highest-selling Android watch model, clearly did not really feel any strain to match this development, prioritizing a skinnier design.
However by the point the Galaxy Watch 7 arrives, Samsung actually cannot stick to the established order any longer. It wants to leap to 32GB on the very least, and a hypothetical Galaxy Watch 7 Professional mannequin — which might convey again the Galaxy Watch 5 Professional‘s 3-day battery life — may match the Apple Watch with 64GB.
Or, if Samsung desires to remain stingy and lower your expenses on the bottom mannequin, it ought to let hardcore smartwatch followers like Andrew pay a little bit further for extra storage, similar to you possibly can for Galaxy telephones.
Regardless of its lower-than-average storage, the Galaxy Watch 6 remains to be our favourite Android watch. It provides a thin-bordered, ultra-bright show paired with super-speedy efficiency and respectable battery life.
