Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 goes official with massive display, speed, and battery upgrades

Alongside its three new foldable phones, Samsung unveiled two new smartwatches during its July 22 Galaxy Unpacked event: the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 and Galaxy Watch 9. The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 brings substantial upgrades in display quality, performance, and battery life.

It also offers improvements in comfort, connectivity, and fitness tracking. Let us take a closer look at Samsung's flagship smartwatch for 2026.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 builds on the design introduced by its predecessor with further refinements. It still uses a titanium frame, a sapphire crystal back, and three physical buttons. However, two of those buttons have lost their colored markings, giving the design a more sophisticated look. The bezel now features numerals as hour markings.

Samsung claims that its new flagship smartwatch is 12% thinner and 26% lighter than the original Galaxy Watch Ultra. Its watch band is also 34% thinner and softer, making the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 more comfortable to wear throughout the day.

Its 800mAh battery has a 35% larger capacity than the Galaxy Watch Ultra's battery, making it the longest-lasting Galaxy Watch ever.

Samsung has also made its new smartwatch more durable. It now features an IP69K rating for dust and water resistance, supports up to 10 ATM of water resistance, and has EN13319 certification for deep-sea diving gear.

Samsung also collaborated with world-renowned diving gear maker Mares to make the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 a professional-grade dive computer. It can automatically track dive time, depth, and water temperature when it detects a dive.

Its 1.52-inch circular Super AMOLED screen can reach up to 5,000 nits of peak brightness, making it 66% brighter than the Galaxy Watch Ultra. Its display resolution remains unchanged at 480 x 480 pixels.

The new smartwatch is also the world's first wearable to use Qualcomm's flagship wearable chipset, the Snapdragon Wear Elite. It is a 3nm chip that offers up to 32% faster CPU performance and up to 19% faster graphics performance.

It has 2GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. Connectivity features include LTE, dual-band GPS (L1 + L5), dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 6.0, and NFC.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 has an accelerometer, altimeter, barometer, compass, gyroscope, heart rate monitor, SpO2 sensor, and temperature sensor. Its BioActive Sensor can estimate your body fat percentage, body mass index (BMI), and skeletal muscle mass.

The new Vitals feature tracks your blood oxygen level, heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and skin temperature overnight to establish baseline measurements. It then notifies you if any of those readings deviate from their normal range.

The Fitness Index feature analyzes your daily step count, heart rate, and VO2 max and compares them with those of people in your age group. After identifying areas for improvement, it provides tailored workouts and goals to help you improve over time.

The watch runs Wear OS 7-based One UI 9 Watch software out of the box. With the new “Raise to Talk” feature, you can summon Gemini by raising your hand and bringing the watch closer to your face.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra 2 is priced at $699 in the US for its solve variant which has LTE connectivity. Pricing for some other regions can be viewed here.

It comes in two colors: Titanium Gray and Titanium Silver. It comes bundled with the Marine Band, which is made of silicone. Samsung also offers two additional band options: the Peakform Band, a PU and silicone hybrid, and the fabric Trail Band.