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Do you even antioxidant bruh? Samsung’s latest smartwatch can help answer that question and provide receipts, should you need it. The Galaxy Watch 8 series, which the company unveiled at its Unpacked event today, comes with a new test that uses existing optical sensors to gauge the level of antioxidants in your body. That’s present in both the standard Watch 8 as well as the new Watch 8 Classic, which comes with the rotating bezel that has historically been popular with Samsung smartwatch fans.
The Watch 8 is also what Samsung calls “the thinnest Watch 8 ever,” which I think is supposed to mean it’s the slimmest Galaxy Watch to date. Despite the smaller profile, the Watch 8 also has bigger batteries, a new “dynamic lug system” for its bands, as well as other hardware tweaks like a brighter screen and a possibly polarizing “cushion design.”
Gemini comes to the Galaxy Watch 8 series
The Galaxy Watch 8 series is the first to launch with Wear OS 6 out of the box. With that, it’s also getting support for Google’s Gemini AI assistant. Theoretically, this means Gemini can do on the Watch 8 what it can on your phone. But at the large, busy demo area where I checked out the new watches this week, the Gemini integration was laggy at best.
Using the prompt suggested by Samsung’s reps. I asked Gemini to tell me “two cool things to do in New York City.” There was a noticeable multi-second pause before the Watch 8 Classic I was testing registered the request and showed the words on its screen. It then took another second or so for the answer to be displayed (we have a video of this sluggishness, check it out below).
To its credit, Gemini’s answers were fairly accurate, depending on your definition of “cool.” For example, it recommended the High Line park and an observation deck at Top of the Rock as candidates. But when Samsung reps and I followed up with “Add that to Samsung Notes” or “Add that to Google Tasks,” both of which are apps the assistant is supposed to be able to interact with, the system never completed either action. On one attempt, Gemini said I would first need to connect Google Workspace to the device, while on another try I got a more general error message.
It’s most likely the demo units were either failing due to spotty Wi-Fi or not set up for certain apps, and we’ll need to properly test Gemini on a review unit in the real world to see how responsive and effective it actually is.
Preview of the new antioxidant test on the Galaxy Watch 8
Of all the new features coming to the Galaxy Watch 8 series, I was most intrigued by the antioxidant test. It doesn’t require specialized hardware and uses what appear to be the same optical sensors that were on previous Galaxy watches. You do need to remove the watch from your wrist and place your thumb on the heart rate scanner on the underside, though, so this is definitely a test that can't passively track data in the background.
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