Samsung Galaxy Fit 2 review
Last Updated on by Daniel Lawrence
Despite its high price tag, the Samsung Galaxy Fit 2 has the capability to track your steps, sleep, and heart rate.
It replaces the Galaxy Fit and Galaxy Fit e, with Samsung adding an AMOLED touchscreen display for a better match with the Xiaomi Mi Band 5 and ditching the physical button for a more attractive, streamlined design.
Those slim, light sporty bands house sensors for tracking steps, monitoring sleep (including REM insights), and tracking exercise. There’s also automatic exercise tracking, although you’re better off doing it manually. Since there is no GPS, exercise tracking is motion sensor-based, which makes it less accurate for outdoor activities like running.
Additionally, there is space for an optical heart rate monitor to allow continuous monitoring, to measure heart rate during exercise, and to monitor stress. However, it fails to deliver accurate data for all of those purposes.
In addition to fitness and health features, it offers smartwatch-style features like notifications, music controls, weather forecasts, and watch faces you can sync from the Samsung Galaxy Wearable app. The app is compatible with both Android and iPhones, but Android support enables you to reply to messages from the wrist.
In our testing, we found the stated battery life of up to 15 days to be a bit generous, especially if you use features like continuous heart rate monitoring or regularly record workouts during the week.
It is a step up from the Galaxy Fit duo it replaces. It is a cheap fitness tracker with a nice screen and a nice feeling to wear, and it tracks steps and sleeps well enough. The tracker from Samsung doesn’t offer much more than that, however.
Design
The Samsung Galaxy Fit 2 comes with a choice of black or scarlet silicone bands and a non-removable AMOLED display that measures 11.1mm thick and weighs 21g. Samsung has ditched the plastic bezel it used on the original Galaxy Fit for a more unified look between the band and screen and it’s definitely for the better.
It now boasts a larger 1.1-inch display with a 126 x 294 resolution similar to what you’ll find on the Xiaomi Mi Band 5. Despite its maximum brightness setting, it has nice, rich, vibrant colors and it’s bright, too. This monitor offers good viewing angles in bright outdoor light, and it is easy to view during nighttime exercise sessions. The display isn’t always on, although we suspect that is because the battery life is so good.
Navigating is done through the touchscreen display, which is responsive and nice to use. There is no physical button on the watch, but you can jump back to the main watch screen using a capacitive touch-sensitive area at the bottom of the display.
Fit 2 can be submerged in water up to 5ATM thanks to its water-resistant rating. Despite the lockdown, it passes the shower test and allows you to test the new handwashing timer app without issues.
Overall, it is a fitness tracker that is enjoyable to live with. Besides being light and attractive, it has an excellent display and doesn’t weigh much at all on your wrist. In Fit 2, the band looks much better than the first Fit.
Performance
The watch has quite a few useful features when you aren’t counting steps or tracking workouts. To start off, you have your notifications, which you can access by tapping right on the display. A tap on the icon will expand it so you can see where the notification is coming from.
You can’t see images or pictures sent to you because of the narrow screen. You’ll need to scroll to read longer messages. You can also select one of the preset responses or create your own custom responses when it’s paired with an Android phone.
You’ll also find a decent collection of watch faces here, most of which make good use of the touchscreen display and will let you show off your daily activity stats.
There is also a widget for music controls, along with weather forecasts and the new handwashing app, which is a welcome addition. It merely provides a countdown to make sure you wash for the correct amount of time, vibrating whenever the countdown reaches 0.
The slimness of this device makes it difficult to offer much in the way of smartwatch features. Samsung does, however, offer some decent smartwatch capabilities.
Samsung claims the 159mAh battery will provide you with up to 15 days of usage and 21 days of low power mode. As a result of our testing, the daily battery drop-off with notifications on, the screen at half its maximum brightness setting, and a 45-minute workout was around 10%.
The figure was closer to 15-20% in more intensive use, tracking longer periods of exercise. As a result, we were able to get about seven days of battery life. If you’re content with basic features and don’t need features like all-day heart rate monitoring, you can extend its battery life to double figures.
Fitness tracking
It is expected that the Samsung Galaxy Fit 2 will be able to do many of the same things as the original Fit. With accelerometers and gyroscopes, you can track movement and detect sleep automatically. Additionally, there is an optical heart rate monitor to provide heart rate data during exercise and continuous monitoring to track stress levels.
You won’t find an altimeter to track elevation or any GPS support (either on-board or via tethering).
Those daily activity stats will show you how many steps you’ve taken, how far you’ve traveled, and how many calories you’ve burned. On the device, a dedicated widget displays step counts, while the Health app provides additional data. The only thing that keeps you motivated to move is the inactivity notifications.
We compared it to the Fitbit Sense and the Garmin Fenix 6’s fitness tracking features, and it reported around 500-1,000 steps less on most days, and about 1km less for distance covered. The Garmin and Fitbit trackers provided more consistent data, but that is not to say the Sense or Fenix 6 are more accurate.
If you’re looking to track your heart rate, either during workouts or during the day and night, based on our experience, it’s not as well suited for that. Compared with the Fitbit Sense and Garmin Fenix 6, the daily resting heart rate readings were generally around 10bpm higher.
The average and maximum heart rate readings were way of a Garmin HRM Pro chest strap monitor when you switch to exercise tracking. By as much as 20 beats per minute. Switching to the FIIT home workout app, the experience was similar. Comparatively, it recorded lower average and maximum heart rate readings than the Apple Watch Series 6, which has one of the most reliable wrist-based monitors.
In addition to the heart rate monitor, stress tracking is also powered by it, which due to accuracy issues doesn’t seem like data you can rely on to the same extent.
Due to the lack of GPS, you also have to rely on using an accelerometer, which is less reliable, so it’s no surprise that it falls short of a GPS running watch. In comparison to a Garmin Forerunner 745, it recorded a nine-mile run as an 8.4-mile run, and the difference was similar for shorter distance runs.
You can track your sleep automatically with snapshot data on the band and see more statistics inside the Samsung Health app before you go to bed. It will track sleep duration and provide insights into sleep efficiency with a breakdown of awake, REM, light, and deep sleep periods. To start looking more closely at trends, you can also view your average bedtime, wake-up time, and sleep time.
In terms of accuracy, we compared it to Fitbit’s extremely reliable sleep monitoring features and found it typically recorded an extra hour of sleep. As you can see from the breakdown of that sleep time, light and awake times were similar, while numbers attached to deep and REM sleep seemed low. On the whole, the sleep tracking experience is satisfactory, but there are some questions about the accuracy. However, this isn’t the worst experience we’ve had.
Overall, this is a fitness tracker that does the basics well, but when it tries to do more, it doesn’t quite deliver.
Software
The Fit 2 requires you to install two apps on your phone in order to make the most of it. Firstly, there is the Galaxy Wearable app where you can customize your settings, such as setting up quick replies, adjusting notification support, and adjusting the order of widgets on the tracker. The watch face can also be changed here.
In order to dig deeper into your fitness and health stats, you must also download Samsung Health. There have not been many changes since the first Fit was launched. On the Home screen, you can see things like step counts, active time, exercise history, sleep tracking, and heart rate. You can also manually enter data from other health monitors, such as blood oxygen and blood pressure.
Samsung Health allows you to connect with other friends and check your stats against those of the average user in the Together app section. Last but not least, the Discover tab has been redesigned and includes fitness programs, audio-themed around mindfulness and meditation, as well as access to compatible workout apps. Although some of these features are not free, you do have access to them if you want to go beyond just tracking steps and sleep.
By and large, the app is pretty straightforward to use. However, some widgets like the ones related to exercise tracking and daily activity tracking could benefit from being more streamlined and intuitive to use. There isn’t quite the same level of user-friendliness as Fitbit, but it’s still a straightforward app.
| Pros | Cons |
| Nice watch face collection | Generous battery life claims |
| Easy to use | No form of GPS support |
| Comfortable to wear and improved screen | Questionable heart rate accuracy |
Conclusion
The Samsung Galaxy Fit 2 is a more polished device than the last Fit and is definitely one of the nicest-looking cheap fitness trackers you can buy. While it does a good job of tracking those basics, it falters when you try to monitor heart rate or track exercise. As long as you’re happy with just the basics and a few smartwatch features, you’ll be happy here. Despite this, the Xiaomi Mi Band 5 is likely to be a better value, while Fitbit’s cheapest tracker will offer a more reliable tracking experience.
