Everyone loves trading. That’s the whole point of a budget device like the Samsung Galaxy Watch FE: it may lack the flashy features and premium hardware of a flagship watch, but In exchange, you save a bunch of cash. It’s a fair, reasonable trade-off—but only if the company strikes the right balance between price and features. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch FE, priced at $199.99, far exceeded expectations.
Here’s the thing. From a design perspective, the Watch FE is a lot of like New Galaxy Watch 7priced at $299.99. They look almost identical! They share most of the same software features, Such as activity tracking, notifications and advanced health features such as EKG and body composition analysis. Most of the things you can do on Watch 7 can also be done on Watch FE.
But behind the scenes, Watch FE is actually just a rebranded product galaxy watch 4Launching in 2021. The only upgrades compared to the Watch 4 are a more durable sapphire crystal lens and an updated one-click strap mechanism.
Because it’s essentially a Galaxy Watch 4, it also performs similarly to the Galaxy Watch 4. Swiping around the screen is always laggy, which doesn’t give you confidence that FE will be able to handle future versions of Wear OS smoothly. If I buy a refurbished Watch 4, I might give up on the screen jitter and slowness issues. new Watch, and paying $200 (or $250 if you want LTE) for delayed performance feels wrong.
The battery life is also not as good as the Watch 7. I let it last for 24 hours, but that was with the always-on display disabled and battery saver mode fully utilized. You can probably get more mileage if you adjust the settings, but with normal use (no low power mode) I got around 18-20 hours of battery life. This is definitely a watch that needs to be charged every day. The 40mm Watch 7 isn’t much better, but I can reliably get through the day without having to think too much about it. I found myself needing to keep an eye on the FE and getting low battery notifications frequently.
The Watch FE feels like Samsung is copying Apple’s branding. If you look at the current product line, you will find that the Galaxy Watch and Apple Watch are one-to-one. FE is not as shocking as cloning Galaxy Watch Ultrabut I just don’t think Samsung has the right mix of features, hardware, and price. With the Apple Watch SE, you lose some advanced health features like the always-on display and EKG, but still get good performance and a bigger $150 discount. Apple is betting on the same performance and fewer features, while Samsung is betting on more features and worse performance. The former works. The latter is not the case.
Samsung didn’t have to do much tweaking to get the mix right. Drops the price to $180, offers the same battery as the Watch 7, and focuses on basic health and SOS features. I’m sure That The FE version will sell like hot cakes. Call it wishful thinking, but I have a hunch that the FE is a victim of a chaotic transition year in which Samsung scrambled to make major changes to its smartwatch lineup. In the future, I hope that future versions of FE will make more sense.
As it stands, for bargain hunters, it’s better to buy last year’s product galaxy watch 6 sell. Either way, you can save money while buying a newer processor, multiple size options, and a larger battery. Then again, a gadget that’s great value for money should feel like a bargain. But now, the FE feels less like a deal and more like paying extra for the “new” Galaxy Watch 4.
