Samsung's Galaxy Watch 5 Pro got me in a hospital, but it was worth it. Here's why

So I open this sleek black, elongated box which reveals a thing of retrofuturistic beauty. Looking at the Watch 5 Pro, I feel like I am about to board some spacecraft straight out of “2001: A Space Odyssey”. And I felt in good hands, honestly.

Oh, except for the band that the watch came with. That thing got me confused and I hope that I never have to use such a nightmarish contraption ever again. As a watch connoisseur, I hated every bit of it. But I digress.

Set-up was really easy, save for Samsung’s dumbfounding decision to segment all of its wearable tech into tiny little apps. Before I connected my watch, I had used the Galaxy Wearables app for my daily-driver earbuds: the Galaxy Buds 2. But the watch desired a module of its own.

And now that the experiment is over, the result is that the app keeps telling me that my watch isn’t connected, despite it being reset a long time ago. After searching for ten minutes, I found no way to uninstall the module alone, so I guess that Samsung believes in its products so much that it expects each purchase to be a full-time commitment.

Rewind, enter stage right: me. Let me tell you a bit about me: I love digging into stuff and making stuff my own. Custom watch faces? No, I want to make my own watchface. But despite the fact that the Galaxy 5 Pro supports Facer, I was shocked to find that I didn’t really go for it outside of a few battery tests.

Sammy really did a wonderful job with the pre-installed watch faces, with most of them being well designed and really modular. And while I was admiring the software craftsmanship, I couldn’t help but notice how chonky the Watch 5 Pro is.

I didn’t mind it. It didn’t feel weighty, in fact it felt oddly light for its size. But the kicker? Battery life. This thing could handle two days on a single charge without breaking a sweat — at least, with my usage habits (which include disabling most notifications).

And I could tell that Samsung had done some extreme black magic on the software end. The animations were smooth, the features: plentiful and… Wait, that last bit isn’t quite true.

Well, I’m just going to say it how it is: Samsung expected me to use this watch with a Galaxy phone. But I didn’t, I have a Pixel 6a and I won’t be changing that anytime soon. It wanted me to install even more modules, but from the Galaxy Store. And that’s not really something that you can easily do on a non-Galaxy phone.

So what was my genius solution? Remove the tiles and pretend those features, that I presumably paid for, did not exist.

And then we have all of the other features that I wouldn’t really use anyway, like measuring how well my rowing went, which I do regularly on the non-existent river that’s right next to my house that I don’t own.

 

Anyway, I decided to make the most out of that large battery and actually use a watch, which isn’t the Huawei GT 2, for sleep tracking. I’m not sleeping well as of late, and that’s a whole different story, but I was hoping that maybe the Watch 5 Pro could help me fix that.

And you know how that went? Well, it went so well that I wound up in a hospital. Fun.

So, I woke up one morning and I took a gander at the beautiful screen of the Watch 5 Pro in order to review my sleep report. On there, I spot something odd:

Blood Oxygen: 85%.

Huh.

Then I guess it just didn’t measure it correctly. But the next day? 86%, with the report stating that my SpO2 has been under 90% for 7 minutes! I took a couple of measures with my Huawei GT2 and my Fossil Gen 6 and the results match: it is way lower than usual.

And I got worried. But I had not gotten drunk as of late, nor have I smoked anything. I had been vaping, but the only usual concoction of the typical amount and under those circumstances, I still typically have a 98%-99% of Blood Oxygen.

TL;DR: I’ve got doctors in the family and from them I know that if your blood oxygen is under 93-94% for a week or so, you should probably go to check yourself out. And I did that, because with all of those stories about Galaxy Watches saving lives, I didn’t think to blame the tech.

So. I hate needles. It’s not your typical phobia of needles, because with me, it is way more specific: I despise the sensation of a sharp, foreign object being intentionally inserted in a delicate spot of my body. I hate the idea that I need to actively focus on my arm not going berserk, because if it does — and trust me, it can — there will be a mess, and pain, and shock and Howard Lovecraft may come back to write a story about it.

But that came and went, and when the results came: everything was fine. And I asked the doc to give me a few minutes and listen to my story in order to help me figure out why this happened in the first place. His response?

I checked. He was right.

But why did this happen? Well, here’s the thing: Samsung knows that in order to take the optimal, most correct — but still not medically verified — measurement of your SpO2, you need to perform a certain ritual.

How to measure your blood oxygen levels on applicable Galaxy Watches in 2023:

1. Be in a calm state
2. Raise your watch above your wrist bone
3. Place your elbow on a flat, hard surface
4. Place your watch as close to your heart as possible (without it being uncomfortable)
5. Press the button to measure

So then, why would I trust the watch’s measurements during sleep time, when I’m probably flinging my hands during the parties I’m visiting in my dreams?

I shouldn’t. Because the watch probably got displaced and didn’t measure things correctly. But it still included that frightening metric in the report. As a result, I had to think about the various unpleasant conditions that low SpO2 may indicate. Well, at least the watch measured my stress levels during that time properly…

The same day, while digging around I found out that, despite me setting the watch up properly, the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro had decided that I had awakened in the shape of a slim female, instead of my typical husky, manly form. At that point, I decided that I’ve had enough and took the watch off.

With one last curse aimed at that god-awful watchband, I returned the Galaxy Watch 5 Pro from whence it came, hoping to never have to deal with issues like this again. Little did I know that this was just the beginning of the nightmare (kudos if the track from Final Fantasy VII started playing in your mind, that was intentional).