The Killer Feature

Do you ever use a piece of gear that really doesn't tick enough boxes for you to want to use, but has that one feature that you can't get anywhere else which just draws you in?! Now Playing on Pixels comes to mind. But this week's focus seems to be on the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra here and, most importantly, it's really very good and usable speaker output for playing music on-the-go, on-the-wrist. Hear me out...

Yeah, I know, you're likely to have your phone with you anyway, so what's the point you might ask, but it makes for a fun gadget and I do use it (when I'm in Samsung Mode)! Wandering around the house, putting the kettle on, popping to the lav, cooking - 101 ways - and it's always with you, always rolling, without having to plug your ears up with buds, isolated from the world. The sound from it is certainly loud enough for the above-mentioned activities - and there's a little bit of bass, but perfectly good enough for casual listening. At least, for me. And I don't know of another watch that has/does this.

You do need a Samsung Galaxy Phone to service it, mind you. You can, kind of cludge it on with a non-Galaxy phone, but it's sweet with one. Inside the Wearable app, head for Manage Content and you can see that there's an option to Auto sync which refreshes the tracks from whatever is on the phone's playlists, what looks like randomly. So I asked Gemma!

"When you select a playlist or a general pool of music to sync, the Galaxy Wearable app doesn't treat the source as a massive bucket of individual, isolated files to random-sample one by one. Instead, it respects the structural metadata of how that music was ingested or grouped on your phone (often relying on the Samsung Music app or Android's media store database). If your 4,000-track pool is comprised of albums that are technically cataloged as playlists, or if the auto-sync logic decides to grab a recently added or most played group, it will pull down the entire cohesive unit (the album) to ensure playback continuity on the watch. To optimise battery and storage, the background process prefers doing a single, sequential block transfer of a folder/album rather than constantly querying the storage database for 15 or 20 distinct, scattered audio files. It essentially picks a starting point - often an album or a specific sub-folder - and syncs the entire block until it reaches its self-imposed limit for that specific sync cycle. So the process is pseudo-random at best. It usually prioritises tracks or albums added to the phone recently and content you listen to frequently on the phone. It might just be traversing your 4,000-track directory sequentially from a random starting index, meaning it hits Album A, grabs all its tracks because they are contiguous in the database and then stops when the sync quota is filled. If you want a truly mixed selection on your Galaxy Watch Ultra rather than full albums taking up space, the auto-sync toggle isn't smart enough to shuffle-pick for you. Best workarounds are to create a dedicated, say, Watch Shuffle Playlist on your phone, create a static or dynamic playlist of, say, 200 tracks that you manually shuffle or refresh. In the Wearable app, uncheck the massive 4,000-track pool and only check this specific playlist then turn off Auto Sync. It's a bit more old school granular file management, but it ensures exactly what you want on the storage is what stays there." (Course, she could be talking bollox!)

My Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra has 32GB of storage and she reckons that about half of that will be available for my media, so given the average size of an mp3 track, possibly up to 2,000 files are possible to make it across.

It's not going to work terribly well without it being paired to a Samsung phone, as I say. It will do the sync and stay on the watch even if the Samsung phone is then turned off, but if you pair the watch with another phone, it's all gone. So you have a watch on your wrist which isn't terribly functional but is at least a strap-on mini Bluetooth speaker of sorts! So yes, a feature best used within Samsung's ecosystem of course. And some people won't feel the need or desire - or get the kick - out of it doing this on the wrist and will argue that there are better solutions - the simple one, to use the phone - but I like it very much and, as I say, for my purposes, the output is good enough. In fact, remarkably good.

I did notice that there was missing album artwork and so went on a long, slow and winding quest to fix that - and did in the end by embedding jpg images using the open source Album Art Downloader, checked and fixed by Mp3tag, both for Windows. I saved them to my master files on my PC then re-sync'd them to the phone, then the next time it synced to the watch they appeared! More old-school file management. It would be nice if the Samsung phone could do that all for me by flying off like PowerAmp does, collecting the images and plonking them in. Even PowerAmp doesn't seem to make them available system-wide for other apps, writing them to the files, so I've done it long-hand! Feel free to pipe up and tell me what a fool I've been and highlight a simper way! It's all good fun though, pretending it's 1998 again!

Anyway, that's my Killer Feature item which often throws the toggle for me to meander my way back to Samsung (in my case). What's your Killer Feature that pulls you back in somewhere, regardless of other compromises?