Which of the two top smartwatches is the most capable? Here’s my verdict after trying both wearables.
Apple unveiled its Watch Series 11 during this week’s iPhone event, alongside two other smartwatch models. The Series 11 gets Sleep Scores (crowd roars), a longer battery life, and all of Apple’s WatchOS 26 software, which is expected to be released to the public soon.
But how does it compare to its closest Android rival, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8? I’m comparing two smartwatch icons and their specs. So, who wins? Keep reading to find out. Specifications You should buy the Apple Watch Series 11 if.
Are you buying a smartwatch for its health features? Apple announced at its September iPhone event that the Apple Watch Series 11 offers hypertension detection and will receive FDA clearance by the end of the month. It can’t perform blood pressure readings, but it does monitor your blood vessels’ reaction to heartbeats during sleep. It monitors your blood pressure for 30 days using the watch’s optical heart sensor to deliver an average rating that is either within range or above the threshold.
If the 30-day rating is above the threshold, Apple advises users to take the data collected to a doctor for medical review. Neither Samsung nor Google has developed this feature into their recent lineup of smartwatches, and it addresses a major health condition that is often underdiagnosed.
Apple infuses AI into several aspects of its smartwatch — but you wouldn’t really notice if you weren’t paying attention. Thanks to an advanced prediction algorithm, you’ll get more relevant Smart Stack suggestions that take your historical location and watch activity into account. If Apple Watch registers users recording a pilates workout every time they visit a studio, the Smart Stack will more regularly suggest initiating a Pilates workout on the Workout app.
Thanks to AI, the smartwatch’s notification pings become self-aware: The device registers the noise volume of your environment to deliver pings that aren’t blaring in quiet spaces or too quiet in noisy ones. Smart Replies get smarter with its on-device language model, which provides “precise” and “relevant” responses to conversations.
AI powers those features — and many more — but Apple isn’t interested in calling attention to it. That’s a significantly different approach from Samsung and its Galaxy Watch 8, which drips with AI. More on that later.
This low-key AI approach could be a success or Apple’s Achilles heel in the long run. If and when AI’s hype cycle dies down, Apple will continue making relevant features powered by advanced technology, as per usual. It will be respected for not taking the hype bait and centering its product around a feature that came and went. But if high-power AI features are the way of the future, Apple could be falling behind in the AI rat race.
If you have an iPhone, Android smartwatches like the Galaxy Watch 8 aren’t compatible with your smartphone. So, obviously, you’ll want to grab the Apple Watch to keep everything within the same ecosystem. You should buy the Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 if.
Samsung takes the battery capacity cake with its Watch 8, which offers 30 hours of battery life with Always-On Display enabled and 40 hours with it disabled. Apple’s Series 11 gets a battery upgrade, to be certain. But it upgrades to 24 hours with AOD enabled and 36 hours in battery-saving mode.
Both Apple and Samsung rolled out AI workout assistants during their summer product launches. Apple unveiled Workout Buddy, an in-ear assistant that provides stats, encouragement, and historical data during your workout, and is available on eight different workout modes, including Outdoor and Indoor Run, Outdoor and Indoor Walk, Outdoor Cycle, HIIT, and Functional and Traditional Strength Training. Samsung’s Running Coach is more specific to, you guessed it, running, but provides more actionable feedback for people training for their first or next race.
Users take a running test, and Samsung grades them out of 10. Then it provides a detailed training plan to help them advance to the next training level. Using recovery and exercise data, Samsung tailors its activity recommendations to the user. This feels more personalized than Workout Buddy, and I hope Apple takes notes from Samsung when developing its next health-oriented smartwatch features.
The benefit of being an Android watch is that it’s powered by Google’s Gemini. That means you can call upon the AI assistant to look up restaurants in your area, call and make a reservation for two, and inquire about dietary restrictions — all with the lift of a wrist. The Galaxy Watch can handle multiple commands with shorter compute times. Apple’s AI is more simplistic and a little less advanced. Alternatives to consider Pixel Watch 4
If you want an Android smartwatch alternative, the Pixel Watch 4 is a competitive smartwatch with similar specs to the Galaxy Watch 8.

The finding overturns a previous belief that microbes in extreme conditions are barely getting by in their uninviting homes.
Scientists know that microbial life can survive under some extreme conditions—including, hopefully, harsh Martian weather. But new research suggests that one particular microbe, an algal species found in Arctic ice, isn’t as immobile as it was previously believed. They’re surprisingly active, gliding across—and even within—their frigid stomping grounds.
In a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper published September 9, researchers explained that ice diatoms—single-celled algae with glassy outer walls—actively dance around in the ice. This feisty activity challenges assumptions that microbes living in extreme environments, or extremophiles, are barely getting by. If anything, these algae evolved to thrive despite the extreme conditions. The remarkable mobility of these microbes also hints at an unexpected role they may play in sustaining Arctic ecology.
“This is not 1980s-movie cryobiology,” said Manu Prakash, the study’s senior author and a bioengineer at Stanford University, in a statement. “The diatoms are as active as we can imagine until temperatures drop all the way down to -15 C [5 degrees Fahrenheit], which is super surprising.”
That temperature is the lowest ever for a eukaryotic cell like the diatom, the researchers claim. Surprisingly, diatoms of the same species from a much warmer environment didn’t demonstrate the same skating behavior as the ice diatoms. This implies that the extreme life of Arctic diatoms birthed an “evolutionary advantage,” they added.An Arctic exclusive
For the study, the researchers collected ice cores from 12 stations across the Arctic in 2023. They conducted an initial analysis of the cores using on-ship microscopes, creating a comprehensive image of the tiny society inside the ice.
To get a clearer image of how and why these diatoms were skating, the team sought to replicate the conditions of the ice core inside the lab. They prepared a Petri dish with thin layers of frozen freshwater and very cold saltwater. The team even donated strands of their hair to mimic the microfluidic channels in Arctic ice, which expels salt from the frozen apparatus.
As they expected, the diatoms happily glided through the Petri dish, using the hair strands as “highways” during their routines. Further analysis allowed the researchers to track and pinpoint how the microbes accomplished their icy trick.
“There’s a polymer, kind of like snail mucus, that they secrete that adheres to the surface, like a rope with an anchor,” explained Qing Zhang, study lead author and a postdoctoral student at Stanford, in the same release. “And then they pull on that ‘rope,’ and that gives them the force to move forward.”Small body, huge presence
If we’re talking numbers, algae may be among the most abundant living organisms in the Arctic. To put that into perspective, Arctic waters appear “absolute pitch green” in drone footage purely because of algae, explained Prakash.
The researchers have yet to identify the significance of the diatoms’ gliding behavior. However, knowing that they’re far more active than we believed could mean that the tiny skaters unknowingly contribute to how resources are cycled in the Arctic.
“In some sense, it makes you realize this is not just a tiny little thing; this is a significant portion of the food chain and controls what’s happening under ice,” Prakash added.
That’s a significant departure from what we often think of them as—a major food source for other, bigger creatures. But if true, it would help scientists gather new insights into the hard-to-probe environment of the Arctic, especially as climate change threatens its very existence. The timing of this result shows that, to understand what’s beyond Earth, we first need to protect and safely observe what’s already here.