Galaxy Active 2 Impressions

[happycat9]

Just got my new Active 2 and first impressions are great. Charged it up and set it up yesterday around noon. This morning at 8 it still had 50% battery life. That is pretty good because yesterday afternoon I spent a fair amount of time poking at it and playing with it.

The watch is very lightweight and unobtrusive. It looks like a watch and doesn’t scream chunky little computer on my wrist like some smart watches.

So far, notifications are coming through beautifully. It did misunderstand one word when I was doing a speech to text reply on my watch. I think that I am going to really like its reply to text capabilities.

It automatically detected a walking workout. Step counting seems good. I am a ten thousand a day person, so step counting is important to me.

Hope others will report impressions and tips with their Active 2 watches.

 

[Shaunda12]

Recieved my Active 2 on yesterday afternoon. Did a little but not much messing around with it on yesterday. Charged it to 100% and still had a little over 70% when I woke up this morning. My first thoughts are I really like it. Love the fact that I can replay with text or a voice response. Hopefully, over the weekend I will tweak it more to my liking. The one thing I have noticed is there is a difference in the step count. Currently, on my Fitbit charge 2 I have 8,076 steps and the Active 2 I have 6,556. I do know Fitbit is not that accurate when it comes to counting steps, but that seems like a huge difference. Will definitely be keeping an eye on that. Overall I think I will like this much better than my Fitbit.

 

[happycat9]

Okay, used Samsung Pay with my watch today. Easy peasy! Of course, since it only works NFC, it won’t be quite as useful as my S9 for payments.

I have also made and answered a call with my Active 2. While initiating a call from my watch is not something that I am likely to do often, I think answering a call will come in handy.

 

[spgiva]

I got my Active 2 Wednesday (Sept 25th). I am coming from a Fitbit Ionic. I liked the ionic but the battery was starting to die after 2 years and setting up my ionic was such a pain (huge issues with firmwear updates crashing etc). I am not a fitness junkie, but I appreciated the exercise tracking of the ionic.

The smart watch works very smoothly out of the box (although I had to struggle for about 5 min to figure out how to actually turn it on). Getting it set up with my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S9) was a breeze. And the UI, although I had never played with a Galaxy watch, was pretty intuitive.

I used about 80% of my battery over roughly 30 hours. But of course this was a new toy so I was playing with it a ton.
Plus a 30 min walk (which it auto detected). I will have to see how the battery holds out when I am using it normally this week. The battery does not hold up as well as the ionic (which I could get a solid 3 days out of with heavy use, longer for average use). I basically just charged my Ionic when I took a shower and otherwise it was on my wrist.

I am still getting used to samsungs Health app. I have used one fitbit or another for more then 5 years so this is a bit of an adjustment. I found Fitbit's layout more friendly.

I miss fitbit's sleep tracking, Samsung's feels clunky in comparison, but it is not bad.

On the plus side, the smart watch features are so much more robust. The notifications on my wrist with my fitbit were really spotty, even when I was in range of my phone. I would say more then half of my notifications did not come through on my fit bit where as I get them very reliably on my new Active 2. My only complaint is with messages. I use a 3rd party messenger app (CHOMP). I get all my messages on my wrist, but everytime I want to reply or send a message I get a "do you want to make messages your default messaging app" message on my watch. I decline and then I can message from the watch just fine (which you could not do at all with the fitbit regardless of your messaging app). But getting the question over and over again is a drag.

The watch has a much more sophisticated design. I perfer round watches to square so I enjoy looking at this watch more. I have a couple of new bands coming later this week and I am looking forward to trying them out. So far I am really happy with the watch and enjoy having on my wrist.

 

[Shaunda12]

Ok, I finally have taken a call on the active 2 and it was great. I was on the call for over an hour and most times forgot I was talking through the watch. As you can imagine the battery took a big hit after that call. The watch was fully charged once I got it on Thursday afternoon and the call took place on Friday. So I would say it was about a full day of use.

When I woke on Sale morning around 6 am I had a message on the watch to turn on battery saver because I was down to about 20%. At that point I charged it.

On Saturday was a pretty non eventful day, so I didn't use watch much. Decided then to put the watch back in the box to avoid scratching the screen until the protectors I ordered comes along with some additional watch bands.

 

[Mstauf]

Will google pay work with active2?