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Samsung Galaxy Fit 3: One minute review
Samsung isn’t a brand I immediately associate with affordable smart tech, but the Galaxy Fit 3 is one of the cheapest proprietary fitness trackers on the market. Even Google’s Fitbit Inspire 3 band, which a few years ago seemed like a sensible entry point to the best fitness trackers, is double the price.
Samsung launched the Fit 3 in several territories in early 2024, but its US debut only came this January. It replaces and builds on the Galaxy Fit 2 – a good-looking budget band that we found had questionable heart rate accuracy – with some noticeable improvements to design and tracking.
The Fit 3 has a refined design with a bigger, brighter screen to accommodate wider stats viewing. It can now monitor blood oxygenation levels and also has a decent swim stroke counter. But while the Fit 2 worked with some iPhone models, the Fit 3 does no such thing. This tracker is only compatible with Android 10 or above, which I’ve already seen complaints about in some online reviews: Samsung doesn’t make this super clear when you shop online.
While Apple hasn’t focused any effort on serving up its own entry into the best cheap fitness trackers game, it seems Samsung wants to tap into this underserved corner of the market alongside its premium Galaxy Watch range. In short, the Fit 3 records and displays your steps walked, calories burned, heart rate, stress levels, sleep, and more, with just a few swipes and taps on its touchscreen.
As a runner, I was frustrated that the Fit 3 didn’t have GPS, but at such a low price, I’m not sure you can expect it to. It’s a simple, accessible device that monitors your everyday health data without costing a fortune.
It offers smartwatch-style notifications and music controls, plus weather info and the usual collection of customizable watch faces to choose from on the Samsung Galaxy Wearable app. Navigating through screens is easy and enjoyable thanks to a responsive touchscreen and very clear menu design. As someone used to Garmin‘s convoluted settings and screens, the Fit 3 was a breath of fresh air.
Samsung says that the battery should last 13 days, and I found I’d get at least 10, while tracking at least three short runs and wearing the band overnight during that time. Having worn many of the more advanced fitness devices on the market, I didn’t feel shortchanged by the Fit 3’s everyday health metrics, but I did sometimes question the accuracy of its heart rate during intense workouts.
It’s simply brilliant value, though, with a lovely screen, clear stats and encouraging insights to help you improve your everyday health. Without on-board GPS, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone serious about running, but if it’s your first fitness tracker or you don’t have a lot to spend, the Fit 3 is a brilliant option.
Don’t look at it if you’ve got an iPhone – but if you’re a Samsung user, I’d still question whether investing all that money in a premium Galaxy Watch would give you greater accuracy and health features.
Samsung Galaxy Fit 3: Price and availability
- Priced at around $59 / £49 / AU$139
- The cheapest Samsung Galaxy fitness device
- Made available in the US from January 2025
The Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 was released in Asia, Europe, and Latin America in early 2024. It didn’t launch in the US until January 9, 2025. There are three colors to choose from (Gray, Silver and Pink Gold), all with the same RRP, but the Gray option, which is actually black in real life, gets reduced most often.
The device is easily Samsung’s cheapest Galaxy fitness device, costing around $59 / £49 / AU$139, but even less if you pick up a regular Samsung or Amazon deal. Few devices can compete with the Fit 3’s super-low price point, aside from the Google Fitbit Inspire 3, HUAWEI Band 9 and all those non-proprietary options on Amazon.
And unlike Fitbit, you don’t have to pay for a premium membership to access all of the Galaxy Fit 3’s features. Meaning the price you pay upfront is all you’ll have to pay. The Samsung Health app is free, although it’s worth noting (and I will again) that it only works with Android devices, pushing out the option for Apple users to buy the Fit 3.
Samsung Galaxy Fit 3: Specifications
|
Dimensions |
42.9 x 28.8 x 9.9 mm |
|
Weight |
18.5 g |
|
Case/bezel |
Aluminum |
|
Display |
1.6-inch 256 x 402px AMOLED display |
|
GPS |
No |
|
Battery life |
Up to 13 days |
|
Connection |
Bluetooth v5.3 |
|
Sensors |
Accelerometer, Barometer, Gyro Sensor, Optical Heart Rate Sensor, Light Sensor |
|
Waterproofing |
5ATM/IP68 |
Samsung Galaxy Fit 3: Design
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- Responsive 1.6-inch AMOLED display
- Flexible silicone strap
- Water resistant to up to 50 meters
The Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 looks very different to its predecessor. Its 1.6-inch display is 0.5 inches bigger, with a wider, rectangular view in comparison, which allows you to see more stats without having to open your phone. I’d say the Fit 3 looks more like a smartwatch than the long, thin Fit 2, and with a 2.78x higher resolution on the display (now 256 x 402 px), it’s a lot crisper too.
You can set up the screen to be always-on (which will drain the battery faster) or to illuminate when you move your wrist upwards. I went for this option to save power, but sometimes had to raise my arm multiple times to turn it on. On the plus side, the screen was easy to see in bright sunlight, and the auto-brightness feature worked well to adapt to different environments.
Where the screen was integrated into the band of the Fit 2, the Fit 3’s tracker is easily detachable with a press of a button on the back. I love the ease of customization here. With the old Fit 2, you were stuck with the color of the band. But the 3’s design is more similar to the Apple Watch, and you can swap out the silicone strap if you want to change your style.
I think it’s vital that fitness trackers are comfortable enough to wear for long periods – ideally overnight if you’re going to use the sleep tracking features. At 18.5g, the Fit 3 is lightweight, and half the weight of my usual Garmin running watch, but I found wearing it uncomfortable sometimes.
Because the sensor sticks out from the back of the device, it doesn’t sit flush with your skin. When I tightened the strap during workouts to get an accurate heart rate, or when my wrists got hot in warm weather, I’d get a deep imprint and have to take the Fit 3 off to give my skin a breather.
Overall, though, the Fit 3 feels well-made, and durable enough to withstand the elements, sweat and tough workouts. Its 5ATM waterproof rating provided peace of mind when swimming and showering.
The AMOLED screen is big and bright enough for those still wanting a smaller fitness band, and you soon get used to the basic touch gestures for moving across the settings and screens. A swipe-down brings up the home menu and settings, or a hold-down lets you change the watch face. The new button on the side brings you back to the home screen with a press or to the exercise with a double-press.
You’ll need the Samsung Galaxy Wearable app and Samsung Health app to use the Fit 3. Once set up, the Wearable app lets you customize the view and order of tiles on the device and add more watch faces. Thankfully, it’s also easy and intuitive to use, with fun themes and color coding to make information easy to scan.
Samsung Galaxy Fit 3: Features
- Music playback and phone notifications
- Tracks over 100 workouts (although not all are useful)
- Records sleep stages
Being a budget tracker, it’s no surprise that the Fit 3 omits many of the key features seen in Samsung’s watch range. To keep the price down (and presumably battery life up), the Fit 3’s smartphone connectivity is based on Bluetooth, and there’s no Wi-Fi. The main benefit of Wi-Fi is a longer range for syncing data (helpful if you’re exercising outdoors without a phone), but it makes no difference to the experience here.
Where the best Samsung watches offer impressive GPS for runners, the Fit 3 relies on being connected to a phone for route tracking. In short, you can’t run (or cycle) phone-free and expect to record a truly accurate distance and pace.
Compared to the previous Galaxy Fit 2, though, the Fit 3 does have notable new features, including blood oxygen and heart rate variability sensors, a route tracker, and a barometer. A new light sensor also enables the optional always-on display mode I mentioned in the Design section.
The Fit 3 doesn’t have a built-in speaker or microphone, but you can answer calls directly from the screen and control your music or podcast playback when in range of your phone. The customizable vibration alerts are also useful for setting alarms.
The Fit 3 runs on a simplified FreeRTOS operating system, but you can’t access the Wear OS app store or connect to any third-party apps (such as Strava and Spotify). While the Fit 3 works with phones on Android 10 or later, certain features are only available on the best Samsung phones.
These include snore detection, which uses the phone’s microphone to record and analyze audio, plus the ability to trigger the phone’s camera with a button on the Fit 3. I used a Google Pixel phone to test the Fit 3, so I wasn’t able to try either of these features, but they feel like gimmicks rather than dealbreakers for most enthusiast exercisers.
Given that the Fit 3 is destined for those early on their fitness journey, it makes sense for Samsung to have left out GPS tracking and ECG readings, which would have pushed the price up and perhaps been ignored by beginners anyway. What’s left is a feature set worthy of the Fit 3’s price tag – albeit too basic for certain users. There are over 100 workouts to choose from, although many of these are nothing more than a calorie counter, which I’ll come to next.
Samsung Galaxy Fit 3: Performance
- Sleep scores missed data
- (Mostly) accurate heart rate readings
- Smooth and glitch-free use
This is a tracker designed for simplicity, so I hoped the Fit 3 setup would be straightforward. It comes in a small box with its band already attached, a USB-C charging cable (with no plug, which feels standard in a plastic-saving 2025) and a few booklets I mostly ignored.
First, I discovered I need two apps – Samsung Health and Galaxy Wearable – to set up the Fit 3, but it didn’t take longer than five minutes to unbox and connect it to my partner’s Pixel rather than my own incompatible iPhone. It took some more faff through permission screens, and another five minutes, to set up a Samsung account, but I suspect this is a step you could skip if you’ve had a previous Samsung device.
Once set up, I found navigating the tracker was smooth in every situation. Even when I had wet or sweaty hands, the touch response was accurate, which is a great result for a tracker you want to use while swimming and pushing yourself.
The Fit 3’s 208mAh battery is around 30% bigger than the Fit 2’s, and while I was impressed during testing, I never quite made it to the company’s 13-day maximum. I enabled the always-on display (taking it off during sleep) and got just over 5 full days before it conked out.
Putting the display back to a normal 15-second timer, and recording a 30-minute workout each day, it lasted 8 days. A dull charge took me 68 minutes, which is far shy of the Apple Watch 10 but half the time it takes me to charge up my older Garmin Forerunner 265S. So what? Well, you get much more juice than the majority of smartwatches, which is great if you don’t want to be recharging constantly.
The Fit 3 has over 100 workout options, and you can set your favorites so they’re easy to find. I certainly didn’t test every one, but I did cover the basics – walking, running, swimming – plus some more rogue options like crunches, dancing and burpees. I expected a movement like crunches or bicep curls to capture repetitions, but you get a similarly generic screen to walking with duration, calories and average heart rate. It’s not particularly useful.
To test the Fit 3’s fitness and sleep tracking accuracy, I wore it alongside the Garmin Forerunner 265 constantly. When I checked at the end of each day, I found that my steps were different by about 500 steps higher on my Garmin, but over 17,000 steps, that didn’t feel unreasonable.
The device came unstuck when I went for a five kilometer run without a phone. Because there’s no GPS, the Fit 3 has to estimate your distance (I’d guess) based on height and steps. So after finishing the run, where my Forerunner had recorded 5K (three miles) exactly, the Fit 3 was at 2.81 miles. Of course, this deviance would rack up over longer distances.
My heart rate reading was much closer, with the Fit 3 within about five beats per minute (bpm) of the Forerunner at all times. I’m trying to focus on more Zone 2 training, and love how the Fit 3 displays heart rate zones while running or working out. I also tried out machines at the gym with heart rate monitors to cross-reference the Fit 3’s readings. Again, it was within 3-8 bpm of a treadmill and stairmaster machine.
After all that exercise, I wore the Fit 3 to bed over a few weeks to record my sleep times and stages, blood oxygen, and (most importantly) to find out what sleep animal Samsung gave me.
Every morning, I read my sleep score to see how long and well I slept, but unfortunately, I often found it much lower than the relative scores from my Forerunner. On the night before writing this review, I got an actual sleep time of 6 hours 54 minutes, REM sleep 45 minutes on the Fit 3. On my Garmin, it was 8 hours 12, and 2 hours 26 REM.
Digging into any detailed metrics from the Fit 3 requires you to open the Samsung Health App. There, the sleep data is easy to read and attractively presented, with sleep stages on a color-coded scale. Personally, I can’t feel confident that the Fit 3 sleep data is accurate, and I stopped wearing it in bed after a week.
Wearables have a long way to go in general when it comes to sleep, and the same goes for women’s cycle tracking. I liked being able to log my period in the Samsung app and seeing my predicted fertile window, powered by Natural Cycles, and I suspect the timings would get more accurate the more input you give it. But again, the initial stats felt too much like guesstimates.
If all that sounds negative, it isn’t meant to. The Fit 3 never lagged and never failed to log a workout or connect back to the smartphone. Notifications came through instantly, and while sleep tracking could be more reliable, wearables’ data gaps tend to improve over time: Samsung’s sleep tracking on devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Ring is highly rated.
Scorecard
|
Category |
Comment |
Score |
|
Value |
An impressively low price for the features and ease-of-use. |
4.5/5 |
|
Design |
Loved the bright screen, but found the band less comfortable than other devices. |
4/5 |
|
Features |
Without GPS the device is more limited, but workout tracking is great. |
4/5 |
|
Performance |
Accurate heart rate tracking, a smooth if not basic app and impressive 10-day battery life. |
3.5/5 |
Samsung Galaxy Fit 3: Should I buy?
Buy it if…
Don’t buy it if…
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How I tested the Samsung Galaxy Fit 3
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I wore the Samsung Galaxy Fit 3 for over two weeks on one wrist, keeping my usual Garmin Forerunner 265S on the other (for stats comparison). It was linked to my partner’s Google Pixel 8 Pro as my iPhone wasn’t compatible. I wore the device overnight to test the sleep metrics over a sustained period and how well the battery lasted.
I tracked more than 10 workout types, including a few 5 km parkruns, Fiit workouts at home, aerobics, hikes, and even dancing. I logged heart rate and stress measurements at different times of day during testing and set up the female cycle tracking feature on the accompanying Samsung Health app.
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lauren-scott@live.co.uk (Lauren Scott)
