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Credit: Beth Skwarecki

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 8 starts shipping today, and I just got my hands on a Watch8 Classic model to start reviewing. You’ll have to wait a bit for the full report, but here’s what I’m enjoying (and questioning) so far.

I’m new to Galaxy Watches in general, but I’ve reviewed Pixel and Apple watches, not to mention plenty of Garmins and other fitness watches . Here are my first impressions, including the things I like, and the things I’m most excited to test out in the coming days.

Yeah, the scrolling bezel is pretty fun

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

As promised, the Watch 8 Classic comes with a bezel that rotates, and this rotation is tied to scrolling behavior on whatever screen you’re looking at. On the main watch face, it takes you to the notifications or your tiles, which otherwise you would swipe sideways to see.

The rotating bezel feels really nice to turn: it has a smooth motion with subtle, soft clicks. I showed it to my teenage son, who agreed it felt nice, but then he burst out laughing when I said “and it does the same thing as swiping like this.”

The bezel isn’t really adding anything to your experience of the watch. I suppose that’s because the same OS is on all the Watch 8 models, but only the Classic has the rotating bezel. It still seems like a waste of effort, though. On watches with buttons and a crown, like a Coros or Suunto running watch, the scroll wheel gives you a way to easily scroll without taking your fingers off the buttons at the right. On the Galaxy, scrolling with the bezel is less convenient than just swiping over the screen. The watch even has a crown-shaped button on the side, which I kept being tempted to scroll. It’s surrounded by bumpers that keep you from getting your thumb and finger around it, which I have to speculate may be an attempt to control that temptation.

I also found the direction of scrolling felt backwards. Scrolling left (counterclockwise) is equivalent to swiping right. At least vertical scrolling makes more sense: clockwise takes you down the page.

Running dynamics actually kinda make sense

Plenty of watches these days will measure your running dynamics: how much time your foot spends on the ground, how much bounce you have in your stride, and so on. (Are they doing this accurately? I’m not so sure, but that’s a different question.) The Pixel watch and many Garmin watches do this as a matter of course.

The Galaxy Watch 8 is the first watch I’ve seen that displays this data in a clear enough way that you can tell what the heck it’s supposed to mean. Check out this result I got in my post-run summary after a trail run this morning:

Orange metrics need improvement, green are good, and blue are great. Credit: Beth Skwarecki

There was even a screen during the run that would show my stride’s symmetry in real time. (It was good, apparently.) I do wish they’d call it “symmetry” rather than “asymmetry,” though. I’m curious to see how different these metrics will be when I take it out for a fast road run on flat ground.

Heart rate zones are transparent and adapt to you

Most devices display your heart rate zones without really telling you how they’re calculated. And, worse, most devices calculate your zones from an age-based formula that is wrong for many people .

On the Watch 8, when I saw my zones for the first time, there was a little note at the top that they were based on my max heart rate, and the note also gave the number it assumed my max heart rate to be.

After my run this morning, I got a notification that my max heart rate estimate had increased, based on the fact that the watch had recorded a higher heart rate during my run. Now, I know this isn’t my true max, since I didn’t do an all-out run, but it was nice to see the watch being proactive about keeping its zones up to date and letting me know.

The watch faces are pretty cool

The watch face at right is the running-specific one it suggested. I like it! Credit: Beth Skwarecki

I’m a sucker for good aesthetics, so of course one of the first few things I did was to check out the watch face gallery. There were plenty of good ones, including several celestial-themed analog faces. I prefer digital, though, so I chose something with a clearly readable time and plenty of room for data complications.

What do you think so far?

The best part, though, is that after my run I got a notification asking if I’d like to try a run-focused watch face. I tapped “Change” and instantly had a watch face that was similar to the one I had picked, but that featured my VO2max estimate, the length of my most recent run, and a button that I could tap to start a run.

Of course I tried the antioxidant index

Credit: Beth Skwarecki

I think this is clever, but I truly don’t know how accurate it is. To find out how healthy your diet is (in terms of vegetables and their antioxidants) you take off the watch, turn it away from you, and hold your thumb over the heart rate sensor. You can monitor the progress of the test, which only takes a few seconds, from your phone.

The watch is basically looking for an orange tone to your skin. The more orange, the more beta-carotene you’ve probably eaten lately. The more beta-carotene (which is an antioxidant), the more vegetables in general you’ve probably eaten. It’s a bit of a leap of logic. Victoria Song, over at the Verge, fooled this sensor with a Cheez-It.

The watch told me my antioxidant index is “very low.” So my watch thinks I should eat more carrots.

What I’m excited for as I work on my review

I can’t wait to try the running coach. I’ll need to do a 12-minute run (basically, a Cooper test) for the app to understand my fitness level and start prescribing workouts.

I’m also looking forward to trying out the treadmill feature. It’s always frustrated me how running watches, like Garmins, can’t pull data from treadmills to know how fast you’re going. The Apple Watch has GymKit, which can, but it only works with the native Workout app. I know the treadmills at my gym can sync with Samsung Galaxy watches, so I’m looking forward to seeing whether Samsung can beat Apple on making this data more accessible to more apps.

I’m also curious about (and a bit skeptical of) some of the other metrics, like the vascular load index that Samsung announced. A strange thing about the wearables market is that companies can announce new health metrics that reviewers have no way of easily validating. I can tell you whether a watch measures heart rate as well as a chest strap, and with some effort I can tell you whether it estimates my VO2max as well as a lab test. But what is my antioxidant index really? That’s something you and I may have to give up on really knowing.