With its beautiful design, improved interface and tons of sensors, the Galaxy Watch4 Classic is clearly the best smartwatch for Android. Strip it of a few irritants, including the lack of the Google Assistant and limited battery life, and it'll become a worthy rival to the Apple Watch.

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At the end of August, Samsung marketed its first two watches running the Wear OS operating system, concocted with Google, and abandoning its in-house Tizen system. These are the Galaxy Watch4 and its more expensive $130 big brother, the Galaxy Watch4 Classic. It is this last model that we tested.

For this “extra”, we have a watch in stainless steel, black or silver, rather than aluminum. It is offered in two screen sizes, 46 mm and 42 mm, and, above all, it has the famous wheel that goes around the screen and allows navigation in the menus.

Obviously, it is instantly detected by our Samsung phone as soon as we turn it on. For any other Android device, you have to go find the Galaxy Wearable application and proceed with the connection step by step. There is no iOS version.

Our Watch4 Classic is significantly more agile than previous generations. This tiny 52-gram machine features a 1.8 GHz Exynos processor, along with 1.5 GB of RAM and 16 GB of internal storage. Its AMOLED touch screen has a beautiful shine and a remarkable definition.

First observation: the association with Google now allows these Samsung watches to have many more third-party applications offered on the Google Play Store. We had the nice surprise of being able to add Spotify, Nike Run Club, Strava and Calm.

We have an unrivaled array of sensors. Let's start with the one that appears for the first time in a smartwatch, the bioelectrical impedance analysis sensor (BIA, according to its English acronym). It allows to measure in about fifteen seconds, by putting two fingers on the buttons of the watch, the rate of fat, the muscular and bone masses, the percentage of water and even more. There is also a heart rate sensor and a blood oxygen measurement. The watch can even, theoretically, take your blood pressure and establish an electrocardiogram (ECG). We will come back to it.

It would be endless to describe all that such a watch can do – in addition to telling the time, some mischievous readers will point out. The main screen, depending on the model chosen, will give you at once the weather forecast, your next appointment, your level of activity for the day or biometric information. Of course, you can answer a phone call directly on the watch, as well as read text messages and emails and answer them using voice recognition from Bixby, Samsung's voice assistant. She can control the volume of the music, whether it's playing on the phone or stored in its 16 GB, stop, forward or rewind the song.

Wear OS can also display Google Maps. You can see on the wrist what the phone's camera sees, and trigger it at the right time.

Finally, let's mention our two favorite silly features: starting a timer and letting it remind us to take a short walk every hour.

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The Bixby voice assistant understands French well, but there is still no Quebec version and it does not have the naturalness of the Google Assistant at all. Worse, it is useless for controlling home automation devices, since it does not have access to Google Home.

ECG and blood pressure are not available in Canada.

The battery is supposed to last 40 hours. We rather evaluated its autonomy around 36 hours, which is clearly below the norm.

We can theoretically use the NFC chip of the watch to pay at the checkout, with Samsung Pay. But only a minority of banking institutions have joined in Canada, including RBC and Scotiabank. We were never able to do the test despite having four cards in our wallet.

One buys ?

If you're in the minority of users who love smartwatches, and we definitely are, the Galaxy Watch4 Classic is the best. We are talking about the Android side here, since this watch has no interest for an iPhone owner. Obviously, you have to be prepared to pay big, starting at $459, for a machine of this quality.

Galaxy Watch4 Classic

Manufacturer: SamsungPrice: $459 (42mm, Bluetooth) to $569 (46mm, LTE)Rating: 4.5 out of 5