Your Galaxy Watch can look different based on what you’re doing

Samsung's latest Galaxy Watch 7 and Galaxy Watch Ultra have attracted a lot of new users who may have never owned a smartwatch before or have been using older models for a long time. Either way, they've embarked on a new journey of discovering what these latest smartwatches are all about.

Today, we want to help new smartwatch users along their journeys by sharing one of our favorite things you can do with a Galaxy Watch and Galaxy phone. Some of you will know all about this, but if you're a newcomer to the Galaxy Watch series, you're in for a treat.

Your smartwatch can change watch faces automatically based on what you're doing

Most Samsung fans know this, but Galaxy phones and smartwatches have this neat feature called Modes and Routines.

We won't get too deep into it here, but suffice it to say that modes allow you to seamlessly change your phone's and smartwatch's behavior and settings based on criteria like time of day, location, and others.

For example, there is a Theater Mode that, once enabled, turns off settings like Always On Display and turns on Do Not Disturb on your phone and smartwatch. Very handy! And there are different modes for a variety of other activities and situations.

What's great about this feature is that you can have a different watch face on your smartwatch for each mode. Why is this useful? Well, one of the things you can do with this is to use a classy watch face during your standard routine and make your smartwatch switch to a completely different watch face automatically whenever it detects that you're working out. Here's how.

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First, you'll have to access “Modes and Routines” on your phone — the one that's connected to your Galaxy Watch. Then, go to the “Modes” tab and select the “Exercise” mode.

Next up, make sure the option “During exercise: Any workout” is selected in the “Turn on automatically” section. Then, scroll down and tap the “Watch face” option. Lastly, select the watch face you want on your smartwatch when working out and tap “Done” to confirm.

NOTE: You can only select watch faces from your list of favorites, which you can manage through the Galaxy Wearable app on your phone.

Using this awesome feature, you can have your Galaxy Watch look something like this during regular hours (left screenshot) and switch to a more activity-focused watch face when you're working out (right screenshot).

Once you finish working out and when the Galaxy Watch stops tracking your exercise, the watch face will revert to its previous state on its own.

Following these steps, you may have noticed that this feature is not limited to Galaxy Watches. Indeed, you can also set different phone wallpapers based on Modes. And, of course, using these clever Samsung tools, you can try a variety of other watch face and Mode combinations for both your phone and Galaxy Watch.

This fantastic feature is available on Galaxy phones running the latest One UI versions and on Samsung's range of Wear OS smartwatches — not just the latest models. Make sure you try it out even if you don't have a 2024 Galaxy Watch.