Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 5 to launch August 26

Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley reviews the features of Samsung's newest Galaxy Watch.

影片文字轉錄稿

[AUDIO LOGO]

BRIAN CHEUNG: Well, now from smart batteries to smartwatches, the Samsung Galaxy Watch5 advancing the Android presence in the wearables space. Let's bring in Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley, who had the chance to play around with it. Dan, how smart is this thing?

DAN HOWLEY: It's pretty smart. Smarter than me, that's debatable. I actually have this watch here, this is the Galaxy Watch5, there's also the Galaxy Watch5 Pro. And the Galaxy Watch5 starts at $279, This is an Android-powered smartwatch that runs Samsung's own custom interface on top of it.

Really, this is kind of an evolution of what Samsung has been doing in the smartwatch space. Samsung by the way, the second largest smartwatch maker in the world behind you guessed it, Apple. But what they're doing here is they're trying to improve overall durability, as well as make this much more of a health and fitness-focused device.

Now, they've been doing that in the past, but this year they're also rolling out a temperature sensor, it's a skin temperature sensor, that they say will help improve tracking of sleep. Now, unfortunately, that skin temperature sensor is not yet available so I wasn't able to test it. So I can't say whether or not it does actually improve sleep tracking.

But what I can say is that when it comes to overall use, this watch is really probably the best option you have if you're an Android owner. That means that yes, there are options out there from Fitbit and the like, maybe there's others that you may be interested in. But I think if you're going for the best overall product on the market, this Samsung Galaxy Watch5 is it.

And just to give you an idea of the difference between the Galaxy Watch5 and the Apple Watch, the Apple Watch is going to start out at $399, that's for the Apple Watch Series 7. This starts out at $279. Now, the larger or Pro version of the watch basically, just has a few additional bells and whistles, larger battery, a kind of raised bezel to prevent the screen from getting scratched but that's going to run you a bit more but it also is a lot larger at 45 millimeters, so it's a large-- it's a chunky watch that I'm really not that big of a fan of to begin with, especially when it comes to large watch faces. But I do think that this is probably the best thing that you're going to get when it comes to smartwatches on Android.

AKIKO FUJITA: On Android, I was going to say that last part, Dan. I would never switch away from my Apple Watch. It's all in the iOS ecosystem. But of course, we'll be watching that one closely. Thanks so much for that, Dan Howley.