Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4 is the first smartwatch to feature Google’s new Wear 3.0 powered by Samsung, and although it’s similar to both Tizen and wearOS, there are some differences that most of us need to learn.

This article is for newbies and old hands, outlining some fundamentals and some of those differences. We cover tips, tricks, hacks, and more so you get up to speed using your watch for all the big and little things in your life.

So let’s get to it!

Okay, before we start, let’s get to the bad news (for some of us.)

One of the most awesome features of the Galaxy 4 is that you can now download a bunch more apps onto your watch using Google Play Store.

The band replacement process on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 has not changed from the previous models. If you are, however, new to Samsung Galaxy Watch, read this part.

To unlock the band from the watch body via the ‘ Spring Bar.’ Slide the strap’s spring band’s knob inward and pull the band’s end out from the watch to remove it. Repeat for the other side.

To replace the original band, insert one end of the spring bar into the hole on the side of the watch. Push the spring bar’s knob inward and release it once the strap clicks and is in place.

Make sure you test it and confirm the band is locked in place. It often isn’t!

Press and hold the Home key on the side of the watch and swipe down from the top of the screen to the quick panel. Tap the power icon to turn off the watch.

To force restart (reboot) your Samsung Galaxy Watch, press and hold the Home and Back keys together for about at least 10 seconds until the screen goes black, then release. You should see a message that the watch is rebooting.

Always on Display looks pretty cool on the new Samsung Galaxy Watch 4.

To turn on the AOD feature on your watch, swipe down from the top of the watch face to access the quick settings panel.

The AOD button is the first one on the bottom row–it looks like a mini watch icon.

Tip: AOD consumes a little more battery, but with the Watch 4’s fast charge mechanism, you should be fine!!

Galaxy Watch owners can activate a security process that locks the watch’s display with the help of the Screen Lock feature in the settings.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 comes with two prominent side buttons that can be easily configured to your tastes. These are the Home Button and the Back button.

Head over to the Settings app on the watch and choose Advanced features > Customize Keys.

Most folks customize the Home button key and use the back button to go back to one screen with its default behavior.

While the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic features a physical bezel that you rotate with your fingers, the Galaxy Watch 4 has a digital touch bezel.

To use the touch bezel, lightly press and drag your finger clockwise or counterclockwise on the top edges of your watch’s screen to move through your list of tiles.

If your Samsung Galaxy 4 Watch’s touch bezel is not responding when you press and move it clockwise or counter-clockwise, the chances are that it may have been disabled in your watch’s settings.

Head over to Settings > General > Touch Bezel and make sure that the function is active here.

Tiles are the shortcuts to apps and other features you add as separate screens and access by swiping left on your watch face.

Once you have selected a watch face for your Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 using your phone’s Galaxy Wearable > Watch Faces, you can add, remove, and change your chosen Tiles directly from your watch.

Alarms are an essential feature of any smartwatch.

On the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, you can set up the alarm using the Alarm app. You can set one-time or recurring alarms.

Once the watch supports Google Assistant, you can alternatively use OK Google. 

One major advantage of the partnership between Samsung and Google is that now Samsung users can easily access the Google Gboard on their smartwatch.

The Gboard on the watch makes it easy to respond to notifications etc., and the QuickPath feature is a lifesaver!!

After installing Gboard, you should consider changing your watch’s default voice-to-text to Google instead of Samsung’s default.

To do this, open Settings > General > Text-to-speech and tap Preferred Engine. Choose Google Speech. Then, tap the back button to confirm your selection.

If you pair it with a Samsung phone, this is a pretty cool feature on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4. An animated and personal emoji shows up when you have pending notifications on your watch.

If you don’t have a Samsung phone, you can use two default generic AR emojis –one female and one male.

To add an AR emoji to your watch face settings in the Wearable app, tap Watch faces settings and choose the AR Emojis watch face.

To use this feature, your Samsung phone needs to support the AR Zone feature so that you can create an AR-type photo of yourself to make that emoji.

If you don’t use a Samsung device with your Galaxy watch, you can create a Bitmoji watch face instead.

You need to install Bitmoji and sign in to your Bitmoji account to create a Bitmoji watch face.

You can customize your watch to wake up automatically when a notification arrives on your watch.

Once this is ON, your watch automatically wakes up when a notification is delivered on your watch.

If you can’t find your phone, your Galaxy 4 watch can help!

Using the Galaxy Wearable app, you can also locate a misplaced watch.

Every Smartwatch maker has its own specific ‘modes’ for various operations.

For example, one relatively common mode on all smartwatches used for swimming is the Water Lock mode.

Other modes that can be found under various names pertain to battery management operation, such as Low Power mode, Smart mode, Essential mode, etc.

This section looks at some of the commonly used modes on your Samsung Galaxy Watch 4.

The most commonly used mode on the smartwatch is perhaps the DND or Do-Not-Disturb mode.

This mode helps you block out notifications for the time block you have enabled so that you can focus on the task at hand.

Bedtime Mode (Goodnight mode on older models) mutes everything on your watch except for alarms and notifications. Plus, it keeps the screen off and mutes all sounds. 

Are you heading into a meeting? Put your watch into Theater mode. Theater Mode on a smartwatch switches off your display and disables all sounds.

This mode turns off all functions except calls, notifications, and messages and shows you a grayscale Home screen. It also disables all Wi-Fi and cellular mobile networks and limits what the watch can do (its features and functions are stripped down.)

Swimming with Galaxy Watch 4? Enable water lock mode to keep the water out and prevent accidental screen taps. Water lock mode disables your touchscreen, including all wake-up gestures and the always-on display.

Beyond the modes, these nine quick tips save you time and get you up to speed with operations on your watch.

From Settings, tap on General > Input > Keyboard List and default and tap a keyboard to change and customize its smart typing options.

Options include predictive text, auto spacing, capitalization, adding periods on a double-tap, removing sound and vibrate function when typing, and reset the keyboard or erase personalized data.

Use the Wearable app to set your emergency contacts for sending SOS messages to and making SOS calls. You can only set these contact on your phone, not your watch.

First, make sure you set up a lock function in Settings > Security > Lock.

Check that your Watch’s battery has at least a 15% charge for this sync feature to work.

Take a Screenshot on your Galaxy Watch 4 from any screen by pressing the Home and Back keys simultaneously.

Want to control your PowerPoint presentations from your Galaxy Watch?

Check out the PPT controller app. Once you connect it to your computer via BlueTooth, you can click on the ‘ >’ play button to move through the slides on your computer.

Watch’s Serial number, IMEI number, and model number are important for customer support. You can quickly found these and more from Settings > About Watch.

Check Available Storage on your Galaxy Watch 4 by going to Settings > About Watch > Storage.

It’s an important setting if you use music as it tends to fill up the storage pretty fast.

Wireless Powershare for charging your Galaxy watch 4 using your mobile phone is available only when you pair with a supported Samsung Galaxy phone.

When you wirelessly charge your watch, some features are not available while sharing power. 

Your phone must have at least a 30% charge available to share its power with your watch.

Remove any thick cases from your phone and watch. Wireless PowerShare may not work through wide cases.

There’s a lot of extras on Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4, including some awesome sleep tracking features, including snore detection and tracking blood oxygen while sleeping!

If there are features you can’t find or love, let us know in the comments section! 

I’ve looked everywhere but can’t seem to find out how to sync the watch 4 display with the flip 3 cover scree

Cannot find a way to disable the automatic feature where the GW4 screen goes black when I turn or move my wrist.

Do you have a solution to prevent that?

I just want my watch screen to wake up on notifications and stay awake until 30secs or when I cover the screen with my hand.

On your watch, open the Settings app and choose Notifications. Scroll down and toggle on Turn on screen. Then go to Settings and choose Display. Scroll down and toggle off Raise wrist to wake. Scroll further down and change your Screen Timeout to 30 seconds or 1 minute as you prefer.

To turn off the screen, press your palm on the screen, don’t just cover it without touching it.

I think that should do it.

Thanks for all the tips! How can I set the back button to directly start a specific excercise to shortcut going through the health app?

Unfortunately, Samsung does not offer this level of customization for the back button. At this time, the options available for the back button are “Go to previous screen” or “show recent apps.”

We also wish there was a way to add your own option to the back button, but it doesn’t exist (yet.)

I have set alarms on my watch for twice a day….12 PM and 6 PM. The alarms go off and the “X” and check mark show up. I hit the X thinking that is the “OFF” mark and the check mark might be the snooze. I hit the X and NOTHING happens but sends it right to snooze???????

I also am getting an alert for a notification from my calendar and again….trying to dismiss this and again….NO GO.

Unfortunately, the Snooze and Cancel buttons are really close to each other. Try pressing the X button and then sliding from the button in an upward clockwise motion around the left edge of your watch face.

Question: When I hold my home button down it reads: ‘ listening’. What does that mean??

That means you have activated Bixby, which is Samsung’s voice assistant. It’s likely that you assigned Bixby as the action when you double-press or long-press the Home button on your Galaxy Watch 4.

But you can change that behavior!

How can I disable the figure at the bottom of the screen on my watch 4 (typically a ♥, or if listen to music, a 🎵?

I think what you refer to are the watch face complications. You can change these via the steps below:

Hopefully, this works for you.

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately, I think you have misunderstood what I meant.

What I mean is the symbol at the bottom of the watch that appears no matter which wach face is used. If I listen to Spotify, for example, a bouncing music node appears, otherwise it is typically a pulsating red heart that is at the bottom.

The problem is that it very often covers info or operating points on the various watch faces. It’s annoying and is definitely something that originates / is built into the operating system

Thank you for clarifying. From my research into this issue, it looks like you might be able to change this behavior by turning on developer mode and changing some notification settings.

First, turn on Developer mode for your watch via these steps:

Choose About watch, then choose Software

Locate Software version and tap it many times until you see a pop-up message that developer options are enabled

Now that you turned on Developer options, go back to the Settings app and choose Developer options.

Locate Spotify and turn off Show notifications.

Repeat for any other apps that have this animation on your watch face.

Finally, restart the watch and see if the behavior adjusts. I hope this works (fingers crossed!)

Thank you very much, Amanda – it works 100% 😊 I have tried so much and searched for so long time for a solution, but in fact I should just have asked you right away 😅 Jan

Does the Galaxy Watch 4 LTE work use wifi calling?

We are getting a message when making calls “no mobile networks available” & yet the galaxy cell phone works/makes calls at the same location & the phone recognizes the wifi network & mobile plan has been setup.

I’m using wifi calling on my iPhone & it’s working perfectly, but I don’t see this setting option on the galaxy watch 4 & the whole purpose of buying it was not to have to pair or use on Bluetooth with the phone, but for my elderly father to use alone, have the ability to make calls, SOS, with voice activation & fall detection & keep it as simple as possible for him.

I appreciate your considerate reply, thank you!

At this time the Galaxy Watch 4 does not support WiFi calling when the watch is used in standalone mode–i.e. not paired to a phone or near the phone it’s paired to.

When connected to a phone, you can make calls remotely over Wi-Fi on the watch if the Bluetooth connection is not active between the phone and the watch.

Just go into deleper and change animation and trasition to 5X but got opposite desired speed. Now its like 1X speed. Help!

Sorry that didn’t work for you. Just go back into the Developer Options and change the animation scale and transtion duration scale back. Also, to clarify you should select .5X (as in half), not 5X.

That was a fabulous overview of my watch! There is 1 thing that I didn’t see and I’m hoping you can fill me in. When sending texts from my phone, I have to scroll from top to bottom because there doesn’t seem to be any “recently used emojis”. Just emojis. Is it possible to add recently used on my phone when texting? Thanks very much Gary

So, I’ve had the Samsung Watch 4 for at least a month. It does not count my steps or calories accurately unless I have it on “walking.” I keep it on power saving mode because if not, it kills my battery. Does having it on power saving mode keep it from counting them correctly?

When you use power savings mode on your Samsung Watch, it can reduce GPS accuracy when tracking activities. So that might be why your watch isn’t counting steps and calories accurately.

In addition, turning on Power Savings mode does the following:

Turns off all features except notifications from apps that do not require a network connection. Using Bluetooth, you still get your phone, message app, and other notifications as long as your watch maintains its Bluetooth connection to your phone.

We suggest that you adjust some settings and features to conserve battery instead of using Power Savings mode and see if this makes a difference. Recommendations include turning off Always On Display, turning NFC off, changing heart rate to monitor every 10 minutes when not exercising, lower screen brightness, or using the Auto setting. You might also consider using a different watch face if you think the one you currently use is power intensive.

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