Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro Review: A Great Smartwatch That Is Not Built for Runners

Introduction

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro occupies an interesting position in Samsung’s lineup. It essentially replaces the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic, but instead of a classic dress-watch style, it leans toward people who spend time outdoors, hiking, cycling, and training. For runners, though, the picture is more mixed than the premium build suggests.

It runs Wear OS 3.5 with Samsung’s interface on top, works with Android phones only, and is priced from £429 or £449 for the Bluetooth-only model, with LTE variants at £479 and £419. After extended testing, including plenty of indoor and outdoor runs, the verdict is straightforward: as a smartwatch it is excellent, but as a run tracker it is merely okay.

Design and Build

Unlike the standard Galaxy Watch 5, the Pro comes in a single 45mm case size with a titanium body, enhanced sapphire crystal, and a bezel that slightly protrudes to better protect the display. The 1.4-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen runs at 450x450 resolution, and two physical buttons handle control alongside the touchscreen.

The display can be set to always-on mode, though visibility outdoors is fine rather than exceptional, and the raise-to-wake gesture can be temperamental. Samsung’s D-buckle strap is designed to be more secure than a standard silicone sport strap, and it does hold tight, but it is fiddly to put on and the tucked-in end sticks out. Swapping to a regular sport strap is easy and, honestly, a better daily choice. Overall it is a sleek, minimalist look that suits people who dislike big, brash sport watches.

Run Tracking Performance

As a fitness tracker, the Watch 5 Pro is very good: continuous heart rate monitoring, blood oxygen, ECG, blood pressure support, step counting, and genuinely solid sleep tracking. When it comes to tracking actual runs, though, testing showed the same weaknesses seen on the Galaxy Watch 4.

Distance tracking ran slightly off against a highly accurate multi-band reference watch, both outdoors and on calibrated indoor runs. Heart rate readings were reliable at steady paces, but sometimes spiked very high at the start of a run or took a while to lock in. There is also a persistent quirk: accidentally recorded workouts cannot be easily deleted and just sit in the companion app.

On the feature side, you get dedicated outdoor and treadmill run modes, a running coach aimed at improving speed, interval workout creation, and the same advanced running metrics as the Galaxy Watch 4, presented with a helpful color-coded good-or-bad scheme. The data seems broadly sound, but the coaching and analysis feel less slick than what Huawei offers, and Samsung has not built much beyond that starting point. Third-party apps like Strava available through the Play Store help fill the gap.

Route Mapping and Navigation

The headline Pro-exclusive feature is route support: you can upload GPX files, follow maps, get turn-by-turn navigation, and use Track Back. There is a catch, though. These features were designed for cyclists and hikers, not runners, and the metrics shown during navigation reflect that.

The maps themselves look good and you can scroll around the touchscreen, but the workflow of creating, syncing, and following routes is clunky, and the data presentation confirms this is not runner-focused. The bigger battery is presumably why this feature exists only on the Pro, but using navigation while running drains the battery hard enough that it is easy to see why Samsung has not opened it up to runners yet.

Other Features Worth Knowing

The Pro includes a temperature sensor, but it is not live yet and its eventual use seems focused on health and wellness monitoring. There is also a sweat-loss estimate feature that suggests how much you should rehydrate after workouts, based on inputs like age, body type, and heart rate. It sounds useful, but in testing the guidance felt general and it is not well integrated into the post-workout flow.

A real-time recovery feature after cardio workouts is also promised, but it did not appear during testing even after high-intensity running sessions, so it either was not enabled or not yet available. None of these extras are reasons a runner would buy this watch.

The Smartwatch Experience

This is where the Watch 5 Pro genuinely shines. Wear OS 3.5 combined with Samsung’s interface delivers the best smartwatch experience from an Android-friendly watch: slick operation, strong notification support including images in messages, excellent Spotify integration for offline listening with a subscription, and a much richer app catalog than the old Tizen platform, with Google Maps, YouTube Music, and Google Assistant on board.

Google Assistant in particular is a massive step up from Bixby: quick to set up, responsive, and reliable at recognizing requests. If you want an Android smartwatch, this is about as close to the Apple Watch polish as you will find.

Battery Life and Charging

Samsung quotes 80 hours in smartwatch mode and around 20 hours of GPS battery life, and the Watch 5 Pro is the best-performing Samsung smartwatch tested for general battery life. In practice, three days is achievable if you avoid the always-on display and heavy GPS use.

Add always-on run tracking and that drops to just over a day, pushing you into a power-saving mode that is fortunately less restrictive than most. Using GPS plus always-on display plus navigation features drains the battery so quickly that the quoted GPS numbers stop adding up. Quick charging helps, but it does not fully offset the hit that run tracking takes.

Should Runners Buy It?

If you are choosing a watch primarily to track runs, this is probably not the one. There are better options for less money: Huawei watches like the Watch GT Runner, Watch GT 3, and Horizon GT Runner offer richer, more accurate run tracking and support external sensors. Garmin’s Venu 2 series delivers core Garmin sports tracking, a great screen, and good battery life in a smartwatch form. Even cheaper Amazfit options like the T-Rex 2, with dual-band GPS, impressed more for run tracking.

Buy the Watch 5 Pro if you want strong fitness tracking, a top-tier smartwatch experience, and improved battery life on an Android phone. If run tracking is the priority, look elsewhere.

Conclusion

The Samsung Galaxy Watch 5 Pro is the best all-round Samsung smartwatch in a while, with a premium titanium build, excellent Wear OS software, and the strongest battery life Samsung has offered. But its running performance has not moved on meaningfully from the Galaxy Watch 4, and its navigation features remain aimed at hikers and cyclists. Good, just not amazing, and not the watch runners should pick first.