Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 review: A sleek bargain for wearable beginners

Samsung’s commitment to fitness wearables has been somewhat haphazard. The company put a hold on fitness bands back in 2022, and expanded to the smart ring format last year. But as the price of Galaxy Watches has kept climbing, making them inaccessible to a large chunk of health-conscious people, the company is again returning to its affordable roots.

The latest from Samsung is the Galaxy Fit 3, a fitness band that looks more like a sleek smartwatch. It’s beautiful, feature-loaded, and heavy on compromises that you would otherwise expect from a smartwatch — all for just $60 a pop.

It serves its own set of functional highs and inexplicable lows. If you are someone who is averse to the idea of spending hundreds of dollars on a wearable, but are enticed by the idea of an affordable fitness tracker that doesn’t look like a kid’s toy, read on to discover whether the Galaxy Fit 3 deserves a spot on your bucket list.

Fantastic build, gorgeous display

The Galaxy Fit 3 is a beautiful piece of wearable hardware. It is lightweight, but built well. The aluminum casing gives it a premium on-wrist feel, but other elements of the device don’t feel cheap, either. The clasp mechanism is pretty secure, and the silicone band also feels high quality.

It is thinner than an average smartwatch, but with the right analog watch face, it actually looks a lot more understated — and in a good way — compared to bulky smartwatches with their tacky watch faces and unwieldy on-hand presence.

You almost don’t feel it on your wrist, which is a major win. I have a hard time trying to ignore the bulk on my wrist every time I am wearing a regular smartwatch from Samsung or Apple.

The Samsung fitness band not only looks better, but its lightweight profile makes it far easier to sleep with. The build is 5ATM and IP68-rated, which means it is dust-tight and can survive immersion in water at a depth of up to 1.5 meters for a maximum duration of 30 minutes.

Samsung offers the Galaxy Fit 3 in three colors, while the bands are available in a wide range of shades, but no other material choice apart from soft-feel rubber. A few third-party brands, however, sell compatible bands in different styles and even material choices, including leather, via Amazon and other e-commerce sites.

The AMOLED display is a key highlight of the Galaxy Fit 3. Even though the bezels are not symmetrical, that display is surprisingly sharp and quite bright. You will never feel the need to crank it beyond the 70% level even under broad daylight.

In case you’re interested in the specifications, the panel measures four centimeters diagonally, offers a resolution of 256 x 402 pixels, and can produce 16 million colors. Plus, there’s also a light sensor that does an acceptable job of automatic brightness adjustment based on ambient lighting.

There’s an always-on display feature available, and you can also tweak the screen-on time numbers. For added flexibility, you can activate the tap-to-wake feature, and there’s also an option to turn on the screen as soon as you raise your wrist. All these features work flawlessly.

Running the show on the software side is the open-source RTOS platform with a Samsung skin on top, while the modest internals are rounded off by 16MB of RAM and 256 MB of onboard storage. Yes, you read that right.

That also explains why the Galaxy Fit 3 keeps sending you to the connected smartphone for even the most basic customization and control tasks. But to Samsung’s credit, all touch interactions feel fluid, and I’ve barely ever run into any stutters or lags on the affordable fitness band.

There is a pretty diverse variety of watch faces available in the companion app, and you can create your custom faces, too. You can’t, however, download any third-party watch faces. Unfortunately, the connectivity situation is also pretty barebones here.

There’s no cellular version on offer, and neither is there GPS or NFC functionality. Talking about the sensor stack, the Galaxy Fit 3 comes equipped with an accelerometer, barometer, gyroscope, and an optical heart rate sensor.

Here’s the worst part. This is an Android-only fitness band, which means it simply won’t work with an iPhone. And on top of that, some of the features, such as remote camera shutter and snore detection, are exclusive to Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones.

Limited software, but expansive features

The Galaxy Fit 3 can best be described as a glorified fitness tracker, one that has a larger-than-average screen, but limited software versatility. It isn’t the full Wear OS experience, which means there are no apps to install. Whatever little you get is via the Samsung Wear app, which also ties into the Samsung Health app.

The user interface is pretty clean, and there is barely any learning curve here past the initial setup. There’s a single home button on the side, which can be customized to a double-press gesture, as well. For the rest, you essentially rely on swipe gestures.

A vertical downward swipe from the top edge pulls the control center, a swipe from the left or right edge opens the notifications area and the quick access activity tiles. A swipe-up gesture from the bottom edge opens the home menu.

The Health dashboard is where you access your daily activity, sleep, workout, and launch measurement for heart rate tracking, blood oxygen saturation, and even stress level. The latter is an enigma, because it somehow always shows me in a high-stress situation, even when I am having a good time chilling or reading comics.

This Health page also acts as a daily journal, where you log details such as food and water, or track the cycles. You can edit the items appearing in the dashboard, but it can only be done in the companion app. This is a recurring theme for a variety of other tasks, where you need to offload an ongoing activity to the connected smartphone.

There’s no keyboard or a system-wide search tool on offer here. Neither is there any voice dictation facility available. You can handle calls, but can’t answer due to the lack of an onboard mic or speaker. Moreover, for message notifications, you can pick from a pre-loaded response template, but can’t craft your own reply.

For some reason, Samsung put a calculator app on the Galaxy Fit 3, but didn’t give it access to the Contacts on the connected phone. It would have been convenient if the Watch allowed users to at least place a call via the connected phone or send SMS texts.

I have grown quite fond of the Find My Phone feature on the Samsung fitness band. Enabling it plays a loud audio cue on the paired phone, alongside vibration and on-screen visual alert. I often misplace my gadgets, and for my forgetful ways, this feature is nothing short of a godsend.

The Galaxy Fit 3 offers support for over 100 workout activities, and automatic recognition for a healthy few, such as swimming, rowing, and elliptical. The latter facility must, however, be enabled manually from within the companion app.

There’s also an emergency SOS feature that can be activated by pressing the home button five times in quick succession. Doing so initiates an emergency call from the connected phone, and also shares your location and an SOS message with the designated emergency contacts.

Tied to it is a customizable fall detection system, which uses the onboard sensors to assess if users have had one such event. For such scenarios, users will be prompted to dial the emergency services and also choose to show their medical details on the screen.

For the latter, users must save details such as their name, medical conditions, blood types, allergies, medication, health notes, and address, among others, into the mobile app firsthand. You need to follow a similar on-phone routine for setting up app notification behavior or creating custom watch faces.

On-point health and wellness tracking

There is both good and bad news here. The Galaxy Fit 3 is fairly accurate, in a slightly ambitious way. Compared to the chest-strapped Polar H9, the heart rate activity readings were always on the higher side, with a mean deviation of roughly 0.5 to 2 percent.

Across a workout lasting for roughly 15 minutes, where the heart rate variation was roughly in the 85-185 bpm range, the Galaxy Fit was consistently off the mark. When averaged, the mean deviation was low, but it often registered random spikes worth 5-20 bpm despite no apparent increase in the workout intensity.

Shifting over to more basic workouts, like a brisk morning walk, the Galaxy Fit 3 performed well. When compared against a Xiaomi fitness band, the distance disparity between the trackers was 1.64 vs 1.62 miles and 1,897 steps vs 1,790 steps.

When compared against an Apple Watch Series 8, the Galaxy Watch Fit 3 fared well. However, I noticed that it sporadically counted ghost steps, turning an actual 2.4-mile run (measured via GPS) into a 2.8-mile journey.

Once again, the bigger difference arises when measuring the heart rate activity in the higher intensity phases. Where Apple’s smartwatch measured the average heart rate at 120 bpm, the Galaxy Fit 3 put it at 116 bpm. On the Samsung wearable’s screen, you can also take a peek at other metrics such as speed, calorie burnout, and HR zones.

If running is your sole workout format, and you aren’t bothered too much about minute aspects such as stride length or ground contact duration, the Galaxy Fit 3 should serve just fine. But if you’re looking for more insights, like energy readiness or recovery progress, you must spend more on a full-fledged smartwatch.

Samsung claims the Galaxy Fit 3 can automatically recognize workouts, but once again, it’s not a fully reliable situation. On a few occasions, it simply didn’t recognize me walking and only started recording the step after I had walked for nearly half a mile.

It’s worth pointing out that this watch lacks GPS, which means you miss out on perks like route planning or navigation. For that, you need to carry a phone with the companion app installed. Once again, I was not too bothered by it, since I run the same path every day, and I am more concerned with heart rate data and calorie burn figures.

You can port all the health data collected by Samsung wearable to Android’s unified Health Connect platform. Morever, the data can also be synced with third-party health platforms such as Strava.

Sleep tracking is decent, for the most part

Sleep logging is a tad inaccurate. Over a period of seven weeks, I noticed that the readings were roughly off by 10-12% for the net shut-eye time recorded between the Galaxy Fit 3 and the Apple Watch Series 8.

On a few occasions, it drew a blank on the REM sleep, while the Apple smartwatch recorded anywhere between 60-90 minutes. But in general, it wasn’t too off the mark. On my most recent sleep trip, the net sleep time logged by the Galaxy wearable was 5 hours and 45 minutes, while Apple Watch Series 8 recorded 5 hours and 17 minutes.

The sleep stage breakdown was also pretty much in line with what the Apple Watch Series 8 offered. What I did notice, however, was that the Fit 3’s accuracy gradually increased over time, though there are some functional frustrations.

For example, you need to open the mobile app to see details of your sleep activity, even for the basic parameters. Thankfully, the mobile app offers plenty of meaningful insights into your sleep activity.

It rates your sleep score graded across four levels viz. Needs Attention, Fair, Good, and Excellent. It offers a standalone breakdown of whether the sleep session offered enough physical recovery, restfulness, and mental recovery

The Galaxy Fit 3 also keeps an eye on the blood oxygen level during sleep, and keeps a log of instances where it may have dipped under the 90% saturation level. There’s also a snore detection feature, which records audio files via your phone’s mic.

It works as advertised, but it’s somewhat embarrassing to hear your raucous snoring in the sleep logs. However, I wish that the wearable could also log breathing and heart rates, and put them in the daily sleep measurement journal.

These combined metrics are used for sleep apnea detection, and it would have been nice for the Galaxy Fit 3 to measure these while asleep. Samsung already offers this feature on the Galaxy Watch lineup, but has excluded it for the Fit series bands.

On the positive side, Samsung is not burdening users with an overwhelming set of information, some of which may not be of any meaningful value. The approach here is sticking with the basics, and the Galaxy Fit 3 does a fine job at it without going haywire at the fundamentals.

A rewarding battery life

Samsung claims a battery life worth 13 days on a single charge. Your mileage will vary dramatically, depending on a lot of factors. Thanks to the small 208mAh onboard battery, you can top it up in less than an hour, and get 60% juice in barely half an hour.

Now, about those battery endurance figures, which put mainstream smartwatches to shame. It is achievable under extremely controlled circumstances, which don’t realistically reflect how an average person uses a smartwatch.

If you have always-on display mode enabled, have activated wrist-detection, work out for an hour, interact with notifications, and maintain 15-20 minutes of on-screen activity, you can get up to five days of battery life per charging session.

With the always-on mode disabled, I could get a maximum of eight days. Moreover, if you enable continuous heart rate tracking — instead of manual tracking or automatic measurement per ten minutes — the battery efficiency comes down.

Even if you are getting 4-5 days of usage with a single charge, it’s a fantastic leap. An average smartwatch barely lasts over two days, and you can only get more mileage when you shift to low-power modes or switch to the hybrid OS architecture on devices such as the OnePlus Watch 2.

One of the biggest reasons that I have a love-hate relationship with smartwatches is that they burden me with yet another device to charge on a daily basis. Moreover, having to carry a custom charging puck for each one is yet another inconvenience.

With the Galaxy Fit 3, the charging headache is fractional, and I appreciate this practical perk. For battery top-up, Samsung offers a custom pogo pin connector with a USB-C outlet on the other end, but no charging adapter or brick in the retail package.

Verdict: An easy pick for beginners

At an asking price of just $60, the Galaxy Fit 3 gets a lot of things right. It looks dramatically better than a majority of fitness bands out there, offers a robust set of workout features, and delivers a reliable biomarker and wellness tracking experience.

Yes, the lack of GPS and over-reliance on a companion app are frustrating. And so is the hobbled connectivity and the inability to properly handle calls or texts. But it makes up for those missteps with a fantastic battery life, a no-frills software approach, and a beautiful OLED screen.

If your budget can’t exceed the $100 threshold, the only other option I can recommend is the Amazfit Active 2. But if you don’t want to cough up that kind of cash, merely seek to get a start with fitness wearables, or require a tracker for basic exercises only, the Galaxy Fit 3 will serve you just fine at a pleasant bargain.

Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 is up for grabs at $60 from Samsung Store.

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