Samsung Galaxy Watch8 Classic review: A Galaxy Watch Ultra that’s dressed to impress

Samsung Galaxy Watch8 Classic: One-minute review

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 Classic is different from its predecessors. The Classic series crops up every two years like clockwork, and all feature that rotating bezel, which serves as a way to interact with the watch.

However, while the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 Classic and Watch 4 Classic bear a resemblance to their namesake mainline entries in the Galaxy Watch series, the Watch 8 Classic draws more from the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra.

This new influence means the body is a whole different shape to the new Samsung Galaxy Watch 8, which has slimmed down by 11% to become the thinnest Galaxy Watch yet. The Classic is still chunky, and features the Ultra’s programmable Quick Button in addition to the rotating bezel. The Quick Button can be programmed and used in many different ways, from starting your most-used workout to opening music controls. The rotating bezel also allows you to scroll through apps, lists, and messages without using the touchscreen.

These two features, combined with voice commands aided by the Google Gemini AI assistant, mean you have lots of different ways to interact with the watch, which is great. The bezel feels smooth in use, and it feels very natural to use the wheel to scroll through long passages of text and lists of apps alike.

Other new features include sleep apnea detection, a new Running Coach with 160 running plans to recommend and track, useful redesigned software (including new at-a-glance app collection displays and a minimalist widget called a Now Bar, which lives on your watch face when a task is running in the background) and of course, that previously mentioned AI assistant. It’s also got Samsung’s existing suite of features, such as a BioActive heart rate sensor, sleep coach recommendations, accurate body composition, and lots more.

I’ve tested the watch for around a week alongside the Samsung Galaxy Watch8, and can confirm it's the full package inside an attractive but thick and chunky casing. It's great, but I do prefer the slender Galaxy Watch8 for day-to-day and active wear.

Samsung Galaxy Watch8 Classic: Price and availability

• Bluetooth-only model starts at $499 / £449 / AU$899
• LTE model is $549 / £499 / AU$999
• Pre-orders available July 9

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 Classic is available for pre-order now priced at $499.99 / £449 / AU$899 for the Bluetooth-only model. Considering the mainline Watch8 is available for $150 / £100 cheaper, you’re paying for the upgraded stainless steel body, the rotating bezel, and the added Quick Button. LTE connectivity is available for an additional $50 / £50 / AU$100.

This certainly isn’t a small price increase between editions, and it's a big jump from the previous-generation Classic as well: the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic started at $399 / £369 / AU$699, although that was a smaller-sized 43mm model, whereas, like the Ultra, the Classic 8 is a one-size-fits-all 46mm.

• Value score: 3.5/5

Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 Classic: Design

• The rotating bezel is back
• Added Quick Button
• Redesigned UI/software

The Samsung Galaxy Watch8 Classic only comes in a single size, 46mm, where 40mm and 44mm options are offered with the mainline Samsung Galaxy Watch 8. This is a watch for bigger wrists only, as it’s also thick and chunky due to the added height and heft from the bezel. However, the machined bezel is a lovely design, and intuitive to use when scrolling through options on the watch.

It looks and feels like a Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra, especially with the addition of the Quick Button – so if you liked that design, you’ll also like this one. The Watch8 Classic's display is tied with the 8 for the brightest yet, at 3,000 nits. You also get double the internal storage of the standard Samsung Galaxy Watch8 – 64GB, instead of the standard 8’s 32GB.

As mentioned above, the Quick Button can be programmed for different purposes, and the bezel is used like the digital crowns on the best Apple Watches in that you use it to cycle through options, but the real magic is in the redesigned UI, which I love.

At-a-glance views now offer more information on your limited display, while a new watch face widget called the Now Bar, an idea borrowed from the best Samsung phones, allows tasks running in the background – like Timers and Workouts – to have a small presence on your regular watch face. It works very well in practice, and I loved using it.

My main design concern, other than the limited size options and thickness of the watch, is the Dynamic Lug system, which is borrowed from the Galaxy Watch Ultra. I mentioned in my Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 review that I found it fiddly, especially as a man with short nails.

However, it does mean there’s less case movement during exercise, and the watches (in white and black) look snappy with the leather-effect strap provided. If you’re keen to use it for exercise, especially swimming, it may also behoove you to pick up a silicone one, further inflating the price of the watch as you’ll need to buy this separately.

• Design score: 4.5/5

Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 Classic: Features

• Tons of third-party apps
• Powerful wellness metrics
• New hardware features like the Antioxidant Index

Aside from the design differences, many of the new features on offer are the same as the ones described in my Samsung Galaxy Watch8 review, but I’ll repeat them here. Sleep apnea detection is added to Samsung’s extensive suite of sleep-tracking features, which also includes sleep coaching, snore detection, and Energy Score.

A new Running Coach helps calibrate your running and can recommend one of 160 different training plans, intelligently switching between plans on the fly based on your performance. The new Antioxidant Index detects the level of the beneficial antioxidant carotenoids in your body, found in leafy greens and orange vegetables: if this score is low, you likely need to eat more vegetables.

Gemini on the Samsung Galaxy Watch, the first of its kind, is a headline feature here, and based on my time with the watch, it seems to work well in practice. I normally used it as a standard Google Assistant for hands-free texting, but every now and again it did something smart enough to really impress. For example, I asked it for directions to the nearest Sainsbury's supermarket, and the watch automatically brought up Google Maps with turn-by-turn directions already plugged in. Sweet.

All of this is added to Samsung’s existing suite of health tracking, fitness, and lifestyle features, which are further enhanced by third-party apps from Wear OS. These include advanced fitness features like dual-frequency GPS to better calculate runs, hikes, and rides, TrackBack to stop you getting lost, and body composition analysis to determine your ratio of fat to muscle to bone.

This is surprisingly accurate: we tested Samsung’s feature against a smart scale with favorable results.

• Features score: 5/5

Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 Classic: Performance

• Great wellness metrics
• Programmable Action button & satisfying bezel rotation
• Battery life still frustrates

The Samsung Galaxy Watch8 Classic’s rotating bezel, plus its programmable Quick button (not an Action button a la the Apple Watch Ultra) offer more interaction options than the Samsung Galaxy Watch8, and the watch is all the better for it. The Watch8 Classic’s rotating bezel spins back and forth with satisfying tactile clicks, used to scroll between tiles and up and down lists in grid view.

The Quick button allows you to set two functionalities to a short press and a long press: I used a short press for Google Gemini and a long press to automatically start a running workout. These two functions were for my most-used apps. I found the Quick button useful and intuitive, but I ended up doing this in the first place as I didn’t find saying “Hey Google” always brought up Gemini, as I found speech recognition struggled to pick up the wake-word. However, once the app was active, it had no problems interpreting my requests, usually simple things I would already use the voice assistant for, such as texting brief message responses.

However, I did use more complex prompts on occasion, such as asking it to recommend good walks within five miles of my location, and Gemini had no problem doing so. Some requests, such as asking it about my sleep, simply pull up the corresponding app (in this case, Samsung Health) and the correct tile within that app (in this case, sleep scores).

Wellness metrics were great. I tested the Samsung Galaxy Watch8 against the Garmin Venu X1 in a detailed test which you can read about here, but I also ran with the Galaxy Watch8 Classic and got a similar reading. The strap provided is a leather-look exterior with a silicon underside, so I felt like I could exercise with the watch without changing straps – which is a good thing too, as the new quick release strap is actually more fiddly to use with short nails than first thought. A colleague with long nails agreed it wasn’t easy, and required a very firm press to release.

The Watch8 Classic wasn’t as comfortable to wear as the vanilla Watch8, largely down to the bulkier profile. You can see both watches compared above, but the bigger bezel changes the shape of the Watch, causing it to shift around due to how lightweight it was. During the run, I had to stop and tighten the strap a notch beyond how I’d wear it normally, because I could feel it shifting around on my wrist. Because it’s so lightweight for its size, however, I was ok with wearing it overnight, allowing Samsung’s smorgasbord of sleep information to come into play.

Sleep, exercise and recovery metrics alike were detailed and full of actionable, useful information: not always a given, as many smartwatches are content to merely throw more stats at you without context as to what they meant or how to improve them. My only gripe is the battery, which is still too short, and the watch took over 100 minutes to charge from 10% to full.

• Performance score: 5/5

Samsung Galaxy Watch8 Classic: Scorecard

Samsung Galaxy Watch8 Classic: Should I buy?

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How I tested

I wore the Samsung Galaxy Watch8 Classic for a week, trying all the features, draining the battery down to its fullest, and completing multiple workouts. I tested its running GPS against a top Garmin watch, tried the health features such as the Antioxidant Index, composed prompts for the on-wrist Gemini assistant and downloaded third-party apps onto the watch such as Strava and Spotify.