Galaxy Watch 9: Smart evolution of a popular smartwatch

How does one improve an already good-looking smartwatch? Resist the temptation to fix what isn’t broken, and just add more smarts, as is the case with the Galaxy Watch 9. At a glance, you’d be hard-pressed to tell it apart from the Watch 8, with Samsung retaining the slightly squared-off circular design, with a slim aluminium case available in 40mm and 44mm sizes. It is light, at around 32g for the smaller model and 34g for the larger one, and that makes a surprising difference - this is a watch you can comfortably wear to bed without it weighing you down. Whichever size you pick, the 1.34-inch / 1.47-inch AMOLED displays are bright, crisp and now capable of reaching 3,000 nits, so outdoor visibility is excellent. There's no physical rotating bezel, but Samsung's gesture-based navigation works well once you get used to it. Durability is reassuring too, with 5ATM water resistance, IP68 protection and MIL-STD-810H certification.

The big story is inside, with Samsung forgoing its own Exynos silicon for Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear Elite, paired with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. The result is a watch that feels properly snappy, whether you're jumping between apps, scrolling through widgets or asking Gemini to do something useful. And that last bit matters because Samsung is increasingly treating the watch as a miniature AI assistant rather than simply a notification screen strapped to your wrist.

Wear OS 7 with One UI 9 Watch is arguably the Watch 9's strongest suit. Samsung has packed in an enormous amount of health information, including the new Vitals dashboard, Sleep and Energy scores, Fitness Index, blood-pressure trends, antioxidant tracking and improved workout monitoring. Dual-band GPS is also impressively accurate, while automatic workout detection makes the watch genuinely useful for everyday exercise. It can get a bit overwhelming, with scores, indexes and measurements everywhere, with some not the easiest to interpret. Data is a plenty, and the key is to make the data genuinely actionable.

Here’s the catch – even with the increased battery capacity to 440mAh in the 44mm version, real world gains are far less impressive, with the watch lasting less than 24 hours with the always-on display enabled, and a little over 2 days with it turned off. Charging it from empty takes close to 90 minutes. 

Rating: 8/10

Price: ₹37,999 onwards

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