Watch9, Ultra2, AI glasses : Samsung’s new wearables hint at a screen-free future ⌚ 👓

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Samsung touched down in London this week for its summer Unpacked event, and while three new foldables grabbed the spotlight, it’s the wearables that tell the more interesting story. Two new smartwatches and, for the first time, a pair of smart glasses built with two design houses you wouldn’t expect to see on a Samsung stage. The message is clear: the Galaxy ecosystem is done living only in your pocket.

Galaxy Watch9: a health coach that fits comfortably on your wrist ❤️

The Galaxy Watch9 doesn’t reinvent the formula that made the Watch8 work — it sharpens it. Available in 40mm and 44mm sizes, it ships with a Super AMOLED display that peaks at 3,000 nits and a battery Samsung says is roughly 20 percent larger than last year’s 40mm model.

The bigger shift is under the hood: Samsung has swapped its own Exynos chips for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear Elite platform, a move the company says brings smoother performance and better power efficiency throughout the day.

© Samsung

The Watch9 comes in Graphite, Silver and Cream. Preorders opened on July 22, with retail availability set for August 7, 2026. In the US, Samsung is pricing the 40mm Bluetooth model at around $380, with LTE variants running $430. Pricing for Cameroon and the rest of Africa hasn’t been announced yet, though it’s reasonable to expect it to track the upward trend seen with past generations.

Galaxy Watch Ultra2: slimmer, tougher, built for the outdoors 🏔️

If the Watch9 is for everyday tracking, the Watch Ultra2 is aimed squarely at athletes, divers and trail runners. It’s the first Galaxy Watch to run on the Snapdragon Wear Elite chip, and its display reportedly hits 5,000 nits — a first for any smartwatch on the market.

Its 800mAh battery is 35 percent larger than the previous generation’s, yet the case is 12 percent thinner, thanks to an internal redesign. The band itself is 26 percent lighter.

© Samsung

The standout new feature is Trail Run, exclusive to the Ultra2, which surfaces real-time elevation data and cumulative climb for trail athletes. Samsung also partnered with diving brand Mares to bring depth, dive time and water temperature tracking to the watch, backed by EN13319 diving-instrument certification, 10ATM water resistance and an IP69K rating.

The Watch Ultra2 comes in Titanium Silver and Titanium Gray, priced at $699.99 for the LTE model in the US. Preorders are live now, with shipping set for August 7.

© Samsung

What’s actually new in health and fitness tracking 🫀

Both watches lean on a redesigned Samsung Health app built around five pillars: Activity, Mindfulness, Nutrition, Sleep and Vitals.

Vitals continuously tracks heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, skin temperature and blood oxygen to build a personal baseline and flag meaningful changes. Heart Health Score rolls several of those signals — plus activity, sleep and stress — into a single number meant to summarize your cardiovascular condition at a glance.

Samsung also upgraded sleep apnea detection, which now uses an AI model to sort breathing disruptions into three severity levels — building on the De Novo authorization Samsung earned from the FDA in 2024, a first for a wearable maker. For athletes, Fitness Index checks whether your training load matches your fitness level, while Daily Cardio Load helps gauge how much recovery time you actually need. A new hydration guidance feature, calculated from sweat loss relative to body weight, rounds things out during workouts.

Smart glasses, made with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker 👓

Arguably the most unexpected announcement of the event: Samsung is stepping into smart eyewear, and doing it in partnership with two brands better known for design than silicon. Gentle Monster, the Korean label known for statement frames, and Warby Parker, the accessible-eyewear name familiar to American shoppers, each designed their own model.

The Gentle Monster version leans into a slim black frame with a straight upper rim and softly rounded lower edges. The Warby Parker design goes for a subtly upswept brow line in a deep brown, built for everyday wear.

© Samsung

Under the hood, both run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen1 platform with a built-in camera, rated for up to nine hours of battery life plus seven additional full charges from the case. Built with Google, they run Gemini on Android XR — enough to summarize messages, translate conversations live, take notes from what you’re looking at, or share your point of view during a call, hands-free.

Samsung hasn’t confirmed a release date. The glasses are coming « later this year, » according to Sameer Samat, President of Android Ecosystem at Google, who joined Samsung on stage in London.

What this really says about Samsung’s next move🔮

Strip away the specs, and what’s left is a clear bet: Samsung no longer wants to just sell you a phone — it wants to build a set of devices that stay with you all day, whether that’s on your wrist or in your line of sight. For a reader in Yaoundé or Douala, the real question isn’t whether these gadgets are impressive on paper — it’s when, and at what price, they’ll actually show up here. Devices like these tend to take their time reaching markets where purchasing power and retail availability aren’t guaranteed on day one. Still, the direction is unmistakable: technology wants to fade further into the background, even as it learns more about you every single day.

Between a tougher smartwatch and a pair of smart glasses, which one would actually earn a spot in your daily routine? Tell us in the comments.