While Apple’s iPhones and Samsung’s Androids are relatively evenly matched, there’s one area Apple has been winning for far too long: wearables. The Apple Watch has been hands-down been the best smartwatch on the market since it was released; effortlessly balancing ease of use, simple notifications, and advanced fitness features. Samsung has out-innovated Apple on new smartphone features for years, but for some reason watches are an area it can’t compete on.

Don’t get me wrong, previous Samsung watches were among the best available for Android phones, and the physical rotating bezel on some models is wonderful. But the Tizen operating system lacked sparkle, elegance and simplicity. For a while, my theory was that it was being held back by its compatibility with all phones; it couldn’t specialise in bringing out what made Samsung smartphones great, because Samsung wanted to sell it to iPhone and Android users alike.

The brand-new Samsung Galaxy Watch4 keeps the same look as the recent Samsung Galaxy Watch Active2, but runs on Google’s Wear OS with a custom skin, giving it access to the (admittedly, still limited) apps in the Google Play Store for Wear OS. It also does away with trying to be all things to all people, no longer compatible with iPhone and reserving its best features for Samsung owners only, such as Body Composition, Blood Oxygen and Blood Pressure. Incidentally, two of those are features that the Apple Watch doesn’t have.

But, after a week of use, my experiences have been mixed. Receiving notifications has been better a lot of the time, though I still have multiple instances each day where the watch vibrates and makes a sound, but then displays no notification. At those times I feel like one of the characters in Lassie, trying to guess whether Timmy’s fallen down the well again.

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Directions using Google Maps are superb, far better than on the Apple Watch. Apple Maps’ vibration-based directions are perhaps a little more intuitive, but since Apple Maps lacks cycling directions, having the Galaxy Watch4 show and tell me where to turn was amazing.

Unfortunately, on that same ride, the cycling workout automatically paused when I stopped at the first traffic light, which was helpful, but then didn’t automatically unpause, which I didn’t notice until I stopped the directions at the end of the trip. That was less helpful.

After all of that, I think Samsung has taken a huge step closer to the Apple Watch. The Galaxy Watch4 is easily the best all-rounder smartwatch I’ve tried for Android (though, the Suunto 7 still wins for best fitness watch), while Apple gets to keep the crown for best smartwatch overall for another year.

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