Smartwatches are useful for a lot of things, from tracking your activity and sleep to getting notification alerts and – of course – checking the time. One thing they’re not so useful for is web browsing, and yet you can now do exactly that on the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic.
Samsung has made its Samsung Internet browser available for its Wear OS smartwatches (meaning the Galaxy Watch 4 range), so you can browse from your wrist on a tiny screen.
In fairness, it’s not a complete disaster. We tried it on a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic and the text on pages is readable, and thanks to gesture controls scrolling around them isn’t a complete nightmare. On the Classic model, the rotating bezel means you can scroll through a webpage at speed, but this physical feature isn't present on the non-Classic watch.
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There’s also a zoom mode, which zooms in on the bit of the page you’re viewing, and shortcuts to add the page to your bookmarks or open it in Samsung Internet on your phone.
It is however quite clunky, especially for inputting text, and we can’t envisage many scenarios where anyone would want to web-browse on their watch. We suppose if you don’t have your phone with you (but are still connected to the internet through Wi-Fi or through having an LTE model) then it could occasionally come in handy, but it definitely seems niche.
Still, it’s there if you want it, and in fairness you can already get a web browser on Samsung’s older Tizen smartwatches, so this isn’t a new idea for Samsung.
Opinion: keep the features coming
We might have sounded a bit down on the Samsung Internet browser, but while this won’t be super useful for most people it’s nice to see Samsung bringing more features to the Galaxy Watch 4 range post launch.
We’d like to see this continue, so the wearable continues to feel fresh for longer. Especially because Google has a patchy history with adding new features to Wear OS itself, so we might need Samsung to do some of the heavy lifting here.
Plus, as useful as smartwatches now are, they still aren’t the essential devices that smartphones are, and there’s a sense that developers are still trying to get the most out of them. So hopefully Samsung keeps experimenting and keeps adding features. They won’t all be hits, but some are sure to be.
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Via 9to5Google
