Sam's Club Members: Samsung Galaxy Active2 44mm Smart Watch (Black) Expired

Costco had one of these on sale a while back for $240, and i had a gift cert for 82 dollars that managed to knock the price down to about $170 with tax included. my impressions so far:

-battery life is actually really impressive for a design like this. with constant notifications going off every minute or so, but always on display OFF, i get through an entire day, or little over 13-14 hours with about 88% battery left over. battery charges incredibly fast too.
-it's a fairly useful device if you're not a fan of pulling your phone out of your pocket for every little notification you get. you can respond to texts from nearly any app, from normal text messages, to hang outs, to whatsapp. there are no dedicated apps for hang outs or whatsapp, but the watch recognizes them for what they are and will allow you to respond with pre-determined messages.
-the watch does have a speaker and a mic so you can indeed take calls on the watch itself without pulling your phone out. this is incredibly useful in some situations where you might be cooking or doing something similar. call quality was apparently great on their end.
-took it to a beach recently too and took a dip. there's a water lock mode that you have to manually enable in order to lock the screen from touch inputs. you then hold the bottom right button to unlock it. it will play a little chime and eject water out of the small holes on the side of the watch to ensure nothing gets messed up internally. had my watch in the water for about 30 minutes 3 times, after all that, no issues whatsoever.
-nice that there are certain watch faces that tie in a lot of useful information like your current heart rate. date, time, and weather info all on the same screen so you don't have to go into the watch to fish for it. not all faces have this, but a good amount of nice looking ones do.
-watch performance in general is the snappiest i've ever used. there are occasional visual hiccups, but nothing that impacts the touch sensitivity or general performance of the watch. the thing i hated about google wear os for the longest time was the lag. it felt like using a galaxy s3 or similar phone from that era all over again. it really seems like samsung has found a nice balance to everything to keep it all as smooth an experience as possible, which for me is how all of these watches should be.
-samsung pay is just so convenient on the watch. i didn't think it'd matter that much but it's just fun to use and see it actually work flawlessly every time.

now for the annoying:
-bixby integrated means no google assistant support. bixby is terrible, and google has a lot more of a deep reach that makes it way more useful than bixby ever will be. I've heard rumors that google is in talks with samsung to get them to officially drop bixby and use google assistant as their default, so that may be coming to an update in the future, but i wouldn't hold my breath.
-no free built in watch navigation or support for any of googles apps, since there is no dedicated google app support here. it's all samsungs stuff, which means you are stuck with that unless you buy 3rd party apps that do similar things or jerry rig your smartwatch to run google assistant api, a guide of which is on xda, but it's a long painstaking process for limited functionality. this is just a poor decision all around and makes the many things this watch is capable of basically cut in half due to lack of support.
-the "drag your finger along the edge" navigation is a tad too sensitive and it's really easy to overshoot menus and things because of a lack of tactility. a lot easier to just navigate with swipes most of the time.
-the whole "fda approval" for their ecg hardware that's been sitting for the better part of a year now. there's actually a lot more that this watch is capable of, but is being held back. thankfully with the announcement of their new watch, they've announced alongside that they've officially been fda approved, so that support will be hitting the active2 and shipping with the 3 very soon. but for the first month of having this watch, it's kind of annoying knowing there were functions i didn't even have access to.

all in all, for $170-200 bucks, if wearable tech is your thing, i like this watch a lot. worth it for the battery life and the notification detail, speaker and taking calls all on the watch. for the original price of $300, or anywhere close to that, even $240 like costco had it, is way too much for the extreme lack of google support, which we will hopefully see more of in the future.

all that being said, 210 for a brand new watch is not a bad deal for this thing imo. bit more than i'd have spent, given i had the opportunity to spend less, but if you've been eyeing one for a while, and what i mentioned above sounds good to you, i'd at least give it a shot.

In case anyone wasn't aware, Samsung released their new Galaxy Watch 3 yesterday. Prices on the active 2 and original galaxy will surely start to drop now.

The new one has the same processor and battery as Active 2, and only a slight RAM bump 0.75GB -> 1GB, but Watch 3 cost much more at $399. so this is a far better value, if don't care about the design