The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic are the first watches in a very long time to be built on a platform that could provide Android users a credible smartwatch. I’ve been testing both for a week and they’re the best smartwatches I’ve ever used with a Samsung phone.
Although these watches are running Google’s new Wear OS 3 instead of Samsung Tizen OS, they are Samsung watches. That means the interface, the apps, the NFC payment system, the health tracking, and the assistant all come from Samsung’s Galaxy ecosystem, not Google’s.
After an eternity of waiting for Google, Fossil, Mobvoi, and the rest of the Wear OS ecosystem to get its act together with smartwatches, Samsung has swooped in and made something great. But only if you’re using a Samsung phone.
Hardware and Wear OS 3
Google announced this past May that it was partnering with Samsung to essentially merge Google’s own Wear OS platform with Samsung’s Tizen platform. Google has provided the base operating system, Samsung has provided much-improved hardware and a bunch of new watchface options.
The practical benefit of this partnership is that the new Galaxy watches avoid the problems that beset both Wear OS and Tizen. Unlike Wear OS watches of the past, the Galaxy Watch 4 and 4 Classic actually feel fast and manage to last more than a full day without annoying battery saver modes. And unlike Tizen watches, you can actually use Google Maps and support from third-party apps is about to be reinvigorated with new versions of Strava, Spotify, and more.
Galaxy Watch 4 pricing
The watch hardware on both models is very much in line with Samsung’s earlier smartwatches, and that’s largely a great thing. They both have circular OLED watchfaces you can set to be always on. They’re not ridiculously large and have a decent fit and finish. They’re not quite as well-built as an Apple Watch, but they’re close.
They also start at a very reasonable $249.99 for the 40mm regular aluminum Galaxy Watch. The Watch 4 Classic with a rotating bezel and slightly chunkier, stainless steel build starts at $349.99 for a 42mm model. You can step up to larger sizes or put in LTE for more money on both watches. All sizes use standard 20mm straps.
The core interface on these watches is a bit of Google’s Wear OS with a bit of Samsung’s Tizen-inspired One UI. You swipe up for apps, right for notifications, down for quick settings, and left for Tiles. Tiles are essentially little information widgets you can quickly swipe through and they’re one of my favorite recent additions to Wear OS, because it means there’s less pressure to laden the main watchface with a kajillion complications.
Samsung’s watches are known for having a rotating bezel which makes scrolling much faster. On the regular Galaxy Watch 4, it’s a touch-sensitive area around the screen and it’s fairly fiddly. I found myself giving up on it and just swiped on the screen most of the time. On the Watch 4 Classic, you get a physical bezel with a satisfying little click as you move through screens and lists. It’s great, and if you like the styling of the Classic, it might be worth the extra hundred bucks all on its own.
The default watchfaces are really good, too. There’s a good mix of fun (a bear that points to your notification indicator) and useful (complications that don’t overwhelm the screen but still give you a lot of information density). You can long-press to switch them. There are a ton of them built in, and they’re much nicer than what I’ve seen on most Wear OS watches in the past couple years. If you want, you can still install custom watchfaces from the Google Play Store or build your own with an app like Facer or Pujie Black.
Each watch has two buttons. The top brings you home or can be double-clicked to quickly switch to the previously used app. The bottom brings up a view of recently used apps you can swipe through. Each button also has a different, hard-coded function when you long-press it.
That’s when Samsung starts taking over.
Samsung ecosystem
Long-pressing the bottom button takes you to Samsung Pay. Long-pressing the top button takes you to Samsung’s Bixby digital assistant. So far as I can tell, these options cannot be changed and it’s unclear if Samsung will ever make Google Assistant available in place of Bixby.
Functionally, Samsung Pay works fine. Bixby, not so much. It’s much better than its bottom of the barrel reputation, but it still can’t do basic things like set multiple alarms. It’s somewhat responsive, mostly, though sometimes it will inexplicably take two or three seconds to start listening. Bixby also is unaware that the watch now has Google Maps preinstalled: you can’t ask Bixby for directions.
The vast majority of default apps on the Galaxy Watch 4 are Samsung apps. From Calendar to Calculator, Contacts to Weather, it’s clearly Samsung’s system. It is integrated with Samsung’s system for auto-switching Galaxy Buds headphones, and it’s designed to automatically copy over certain settings from Samsung phones. Some of these apps can be replaced, but many cannot.
You can use the Galaxy Watch 4 with any Android phone, but doing so requires installing multiple Samsung apps to get the full experience. It needs Samsung’s Wearable app to set up, a Samsung account to use Bixby, Samsung Pay to use payments, and Samsung Health for robust health tracking.
In short, if you’re not using a Samsung phone, I don’t think this is a good watch for you. It also won’t work with iPhones, by the way, something both Google and Samsung have dabbled with in the past.
Samsung Health
The biggest hardware upgrades on the Galaxy Watch 4 and 4 Classic — compared to previous Samsung watches — are related to health. Samsung has riddled the back of the watch with sensors. It can do the usual pulse and step counting, of course. It supports 95 different kinds of workout tracking.
It can do ECG for checking for atrial fibrillation and also blood oxygen detection, just like the Apple Watch. And just like the Apple Watch and other wearables with those features, you should not use those features as diagnostic tools. I frequently would get inaccurate readings that would have led me to worry about my heart and lung health had I not been aware that these sensors are unreliable. Outside the US, Samsung is offering a blood pressure feature.
Samsung has also added a bioelectric impedance sensor, which is designed to measure body fat. It works in a way similar to existing consumer smart scales, sending an electrical signal through your body and measuring the impedance. Fat’s lower water content compared to muscle helps the watch get an estimate of your body fat percentage.
It’s a better measure than BMI, as Nicole Westman has explained, but again: as with any wearable, it’s not a diagnostic tool. But if you’re into quantified self stats and are aware of how to put any of these health numbers into a proper context, it could be useful to track trends over time.
Agree to continue: Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and 4 Classic
Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it — contracts that no one actually reads. It’s impossible for us to read and analyze every single one of these agreements. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate.
To use the either Galaxy Watch, you must agree to:
The following agreements are optional:
Send usage and diagnostic data to Samsung
Final tally: seven mandatory agreements and at least one optional agreement — although you could try to use it without Samsung Pay and Samsung Health, which would bring the final tally to four mandatory agreements.
That brings us to the tool you’ll need to use to track those trends over time: Samsung Health. (Technically, ECG is measured by an app called Samsung Health Monitor, which keeps data locally on the watch unless you choose to transfer it over to your phone).
Samsung Health’s privacy policy is not very reassuring. It says that Samsung can obtain data like heart rate, body fat, glucose, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, information related to your menstrual cycle, sleep-related information, and more.
I asked Samsung and a spokesperson assured me that all this information is end-to-end encrypted and that Samsung will only be able to access it if you choose to share it. But it’s a lot, and if you do accidentally opt in, Samsung could use it for anything from creating customized workouts for you to improving the app to marketing promotions.
Apple does a better job explaining that it cannot access your health data. It doesn’t have the keys. I trust Samsung more than I trust a lot of other companies, but wow, it needs to do a much better job explaining its privacy and encryption policies. Samsung does offer a simple “Erase all personal data collected by Samsung” button in its settings, at least.
As fitness and health tracking become more important — especially on wearables — we’re all going to need to do a better job understanding the tradeoffs. The temptation to treat them as medical devices is real, but they’re not ready for that. The temptation to just click “accept” on every privacy and data dialog that pops up is also real. And finally: the lock-in is real.
It’s a messy mix of a desire for data portability, data privacy, and each company’s incentives to lock you into their system. Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 is not unique in raising these issues, but they’re worth thinking about. Whether you’re using Samsung Health, Apple Health, Google Fit, Fitbit, or something else, you may be unwittingly putting yourself in a position to want to stick with that platform because that’s where your data lives.
If you’re willing to give Samsung Health a go, though, its features and functionality are surprisingly robust. It has tracking for all sorts of different metrics. You can set the watch to track your sleep, including blood oxygen. You can choose to use the phone on your nightstand to listen for snoring to sync that up with your sleep data.
In my testing, the Watch 4’s accuracy was fairly good. On several bike rides, it matched the readings from both the Apple Watch and a Garmin for heart rate. However, it was off by about 5 percent for measuring distance via GPS. You can then sync that data over to Strava, but it is lacking in other third-party app integrations compared to Apple Health.
I really enjoyed using the Galaxy Watch 4. It has been a genuine pleasure to have a competent and capable smartwatch paired to my Android phone — one that doesn’t have any show-stopping problems.
But the reason I had that nice experience was because I was using the Galaxy Watch 4 with a Samsung phone. If you’re a Samsung user, the Galaxy Watch 4 is an excellent smartwatch. If you’re not, the Galaxy Watch 4 all but forces you into Samsung’s ecosystem. Samsung’s ecosystem is better than it often gets credit for, but it’s limiting. Just as the Apple Watch keeps people on the iPhone, Samsung’s watch will keep people on Samsung phones (or at least get them to install Samsung software and use Samsung services on their Android phones).
If you’d like to use a Wear OS 3 smartwatch that isn’t tied to Samsung, I wish I knew what to tell you. There are no Wear OS 3 smartwatches from other manufacturers on the horizon. After so many years of waiting for a good smartwatch for Android users, it’s finally here — but only for some of us.
The federal government is ordering the dissolution of TikTok’s Canadian business after a national security review of the Chinese company behind the social media platform, but stopped short of ordering people to stay off the app.
Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced the government’s “wind up” demand Wednesday, saying it is meant to address “risks” related to ByteDance Ltd.’s establishment of TikTok Technology Canada Inc.
“The decision was based on the information and evidence collected over the course of the review and on the advice of Canada’s security and intelligence community and other government partners,” he said in a statement.
The announcement added that the government is not blocking Canadians’ access to the TikTok application or their ability to create content.
However, it urged people to “adopt good cybersecurity practices and assess the possible risks of using social media platforms and applications, including how their information is likely to be protected, managed, used and shared by foreign actors, as well as to be aware of which country’s laws apply.”
Champagne’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment seeking details about what evidence led to the government’s dissolution demand, how long ByteDance has to comply and why the app is not being banned.
A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement that the shutdown of its Canadian offices will mean the loss of hundreds of well-paying local jobs.
“We will challenge this order in court,” the spokesperson said.
“The TikTok platform will remain available for creators to find an audience, explore new interests and for businesses to thrive.”
The federal Liberals ordered a national security review of TikTok in September 2023, but it was not public knowledge until The Canadian Press reported in March that it was investigating the company.
At the time, it said the review was based on the expansion of a business, which it said constituted the establishment of a new Canadian entity. It declined to provide any further details about what expansion it was reviewing.
A government database showed a notification of new business from TikTok in June 2023. It said Network Sense Ventures Ltd. in Toronto and Vancouver would engage in “marketing, advertising, and content/creator development activities in relation to the use of the TikTok app in Canada.”
Even before the review, ByteDance and TikTok were lightning rod for privacy and safety concerns because Chinese national security laws compel organizations in the country to assist with intelligence gathering.
Such concerns led the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a bill in March designed to ban TikTok unless its China-based owner sells its stake in the business.
Champagne’s office has maintained Canada’s review was not related to the U.S. bill, which has yet to pass.
Canada’s review was carried out through the Investment Canada Act, which allows the government to investigate any foreign investment with potential to might harm national security.
While cabinet can make investors sell parts of the business or shares, Champagne has said the act doesn’t allow him to disclose details of the review.
Wednesday’s dissolution order was made in accordance with the act.
The federal government banned TikTok from its mobile devices in February 2023 following the launch of an investigation into the company by federal and provincial privacy commissioners.
— With files from Anja Karadeglija in Ottawa
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.
LONDON (AP) — Most people have accumulated a pile of data — selfies, emails, videos and more — on their social media and digital accounts over their lifetimes. What happens to it when we die?
It’s wise to draft a will spelling out who inherits your physical assets after you’re gone, but don’t forget to take care of your digital estate too. Friends and family might treasure files and posts you’ve left behind, but they could get lost in digital purgatory after you pass away unless you take some simple steps.
Here’s how you can prepare your digital life for your survivors:
Apple
The iPhone maker lets you nominate a “ legacy contact ” who can access your Apple account’s data after you die. The company says it’s a secure way to give trusted people access to photos, files and messages. To set it up you’ll need an Apple device with a fairly recent operating system — iPhones and iPads need iOS or iPadOS 15.2 and MacBooks needs macOS Monterey 12.1.
For iPhones, go to settings, tap Sign-in & Security and then Legacy Contact. You can name one or more people, and they don’t need an Apple ID or device.
You’ll have to share an access key with your contact. It can be a digital version sent electronically, or you can print a copy or save it as a screenshot or PDF.
Take note that there are some types of files you won’t be able to pass on — including digital rights-protected music, movies and passwords stored in Apple’s password manager. Legacy contacts can only access a deceased user’s account for three years before Apple deletes the account.
Google
Google takes a different approach with its Inactive Account Manager, which allows you to share your data with someone if it notices that you’ve stopped using your account.
When setting it up, you need to decide how long Google should wait — from three to 18 months — before considering your account inactive. Once that time is up, Google can notify up to 10 people.
You can write a message informing them you’ve stopped using the account, and, optionally, include a link to download your data. You can choose what types of data they can access — including emails, photos, calendar entries and YouTube videos.
There’s also an option to automatically delete your account after three months of inactivity, so your contacts will have to download any data before that deadline.
Facebook and Instagram
Some social media platforms can preserve accounts for people who have died so that friends and family can honor their memories.
When users of Facebook or Instagram die, parent company Meta says it can memorialize the account if it gets a “valid request” from a friend or family member. Requests can be submitted through an online form.
The social media company strongly recommends Facebook users add a legacy contact to look after their memorial accounts. Legacy contacts can do things like respond to new friend requests and update pinned posts, but they can’t read private messages or remove or alter previous posts. You can only choose one person, who also has to have a Facebook account.
You can also ask Facebook or Instagram to delete a deceased user’s account if you’re a close family member or an executor. You’ll need to send in documents like a death certificate.
TikTok
The video-sharing platform says that if a user has died, people can submit a request to memorialize the account through the settings menu. Go to the Report a Problem section, then Account and profile, then Manage account, where you can report a deceased user.
Once an account has been memorialized, it will be labeled “Remembering.” No one will be able to log into the account, which prevents anyone from editing the profile or using the account to post new content or send messages.
X
It’s not possible to nominate a legacy contact on Elon Musk’s social media site. But family members or an authorized person can submit a request to deactivate a deceased user’s account.
Passwords
Besides the major online services, you’ll probably have dozens if not hundreds of other digital accounts that your survivors might need to access. You could just write all your login credentials down in a notebook and put it somewhere safe. But making a physical copy presents its own vulnerabilities. What if you lose track of it? What if someone finds it?
Instead, consider a password manager that has an emergency access feature. Password managers are digital vaults that you can use to store all your credentials. Some, like Keeper,Bitwarden and NordPass, allow users to nominate one or more trusted contacts who can access their keys in case of an emergency such as a death.
But there are a few catches: Those contacts also need to use the same password manager and you might have to pay for the service.
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Is there a tech challenge you need help figuring out? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your questions.
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s competition watchdog said Thursday it’s opening a formal investigation into Google’s partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
The Competition and Markets Authority said it has “sufficient information” to launch an initial probe after it sought input earlier this year on whether the deal would stifle competition.
The CMA has until Dec. 19 to decide whether to approve the deal or escalate its investigation.
“Google is committed to building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem in the world,” the company said. “Anthropic is free to use multiple cloud providers and does, and we don’t demand exclusive tech rights.”
San Francisco-based Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who previously worked at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The company has focused on increasing the safety and reliability of AI models. Google reportedly agreed last year to make a multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic, which has a popular chatbot named Claude.
Anthropic said it’s cooperating with the regulator and will provide “the complete picture about Google’s investment and our commercial collaboration.”
“We are an independent company and none of our strategic partnerships or investor relationships diminish the independence of our corporate governance or our freedom to partner with others,” it said in a statement.
The U.K. regulator has been scrutinizing a raft of AI deals as investment money floods into the industry to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom. Last month it cleared Anthropic’s $4 billion deal with Amazon and it has also signed off on Microsoft’s deals with two other AI startups, Inflection and Mistral.
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