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Samsung unveiled the The Galaxy Watch Active 2 smartwatch, and it a lot like an Apple Watch. It’s round, but it’s got the curved side profile of the Apple Watch, and with the flower on the screen feels a lot like, well, Cupertino.
The new Galaxy Watch Active 2 retails for $279, and is compatible with Android phones. It doesn’t run Android Wear, Google’s operating system that runs other wearables compatible with Android. Instead, it runs Samsung’s home-grown OS, Tizen.
It’s available in two sizes, 40mm and 44mm, and comes in stainless steel or aluminum. If this all feels a little familiar, it’s because the Apple Watch does as well.
It also features health as a focus, similar to the Apple Watch. It tracks 39 different types of workouts, has 8 photodiodes on the back of it, which means that it can do electrocardiogram, similar to… the Apple Watch.
On top is an AMOLED screen. Behind the scenes is an Exynos 9110 dual-core chip matched with either 768MB or 1.5GB of RAM and 4GB of flash memory. The watch supports Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi b/g/n, NFC, and LTE. All this is to say, it’s essentially a cell phone on the wrist.
A word on Tizen OS: Samsung doesn’t use it on phones any longer, having stopped in 2014. It remains as a phone OS largely in developer documentation at Samsung. Mostly, I suspect it’s there and maintained as a hedge against the day that Google moves away from Android, or otherwise blocks Samsung from using Android.
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