TraviaTechPie Review

The Hardware

Part 1 of this series asked the practical question — which of these three watches belongs on your wrist — and concluded that the answer depends less on the feature war than on two things marketing rarely foregrounds: battery endurance, and the cost of ownership after the sale. This installment sets the recommendation aside. For readers who want the engineering rather than the verdict, here are the Apple Watch Series 11, the Galaxy Watch 8, and the Garmin Venu 4, examined component by component.

Three observations follow from that table, and none of them is visible on a store shelf.

The Apple Watch Series 11 is not a silicon upgrade. Its S10 processor is carried over directly from the Series 10. Apple does not publish the fabrication node, but the part is understood to belong to a 3-nanometer class. The practical consequence is that the Series 11’s gains are incremental — additions such as hypertension notifications and 5G connectivity on the titanium model, rather than a faster or more efficient core. Samsung, by contrast, fabricates the Galaxy Watch 8’s Exynos W1000 on a 3-nanometer process and pairs it with dedicated Cortex-A55 cores, currently the finest process node in a flagship smartwatch. Garmin discloses nothing about the Venu 4’s processor, and that silence is itself informative: the chip is asked to do comparatively little.

Battery endurance is a system-design outcome, not a cell-capacity contest. The Galaxy Watch 8 carries a 435 mAh cell in its 44 mm model. Apple does not publish its capacity; the Series 10 was independently estimated near 308 mAh. Garmin discloses no figure. Yet the Venu 4 outlasts both rivals by an order of magnitude — ten to twelve days against roughly one. The decisive variable is not the battery but how hard the operating system works the processor. watchOS and Wear OS keep a continuous roster of background tasks alive; Garmin’s software is closer to embedded firmware and does far less by design. The endurance gap is engineered, not stumbled into. Part 3 examines that software layer directly.

Display brightness is a liability disguised as a feature. The Galaxy Watch 8’s 3,000-nit AMOLED panel is the brightest of the three, and it is also, by Samsung’s own accounting and widespread owner reports, the single largest consumer of its battery. Apple’s LTPO3 OLED reaches 2,000 nits and throttles its refresh rate as low as 1 Hz to conserve power, but an always-on OLED still draws current simply by emitting light. Garmin’s 2,000-nit AMOLED is the most conservative of the three: its quoted ten-day endurance assumes the always-on display is disabled. Enable it, and the figure collapses to three or four days — back into Samsung’s territory. A brightness specification, in other words, is also an endurance penalty.

A note on materials. The Apple Watch uses Ion-X glass on the aluminum model and sapphire on titanium; the Galaxy Watch 8 uses sapphire crystal across the line. The Garmin Venu 4, despite being the most expensive watch here, ships with Gorilla Glass rather than sapphire — a durability gap that owners notice, and one Part 4 will return to.

The Sensors

Hardware comparisons of smartwatches tend to collapse into a list of health features, presented as equivalent. They are not equivalent, and the sensor layer is where the distinction matters most.

Electrocardiography is the one feature that survives scrutiny without qualification. All three watches now carry an ECG sensor — the Venu 4 gained one with its Elevate 5 module — and atrial-fibrillation detection across them is clinically validated. The “blood pressure” capability advertised on the Apple Watch and the Galaxy Watch 8 is a different matter. Apple’s is a hypertension notification: a photoplethysmography sensor detects vascular patterns over time, the feature has received FDA clearance, and its published sensitivity is roughly 41 percent — meaning it misses close to half of genuine cases — against a specificity near 92 percent. It is a screening prompt, not a measurement. Samsung’s blood-pressure feature is an estimate that the US FDA has not cleared at all, and that requires recalibration against a conventional arm cuff every 28 days. Two watches print the words “blood pressure,” and the phrase describes two materially different things.

Samsung’s Antioxidant Index belongs further down the same spectrum. It estimates skin carotenoid levels through the BioActive sensor, and Samsung itself notes that the metric is not medically validated. The Garmin Venu 4 takes the opposite approach: its Elevate 5 optical sensor feeds metrics — heart-rate variability, training load, Body Battery, recovery time — that are grounded in established exercise physiology. Those numbers attract less marketing attention than a blood-pressure headline, and they are considerably better supported.

Location hardware tells a layered story. The Venu 4 introduces multi-band, dual-frequency (L1 + L5) GNSS — a first for the Venu line. The Galaxy Watch 8 also receives on dual frequencies; the Apple Watch Series 11 remains single-band. On open ground the three converge, but in urban canyons and under tree cover the multi-band receivers measurably outperform a single-band one. For anyone who records routes seriously, that is not a specification detail; it is the difference between a track that reflects reality and one that does not.

One hardware advantage runs the other way. The Apple Watch reaches roughly 80 percent charge in 45 minutes. That speed does not lengthen its endurance, but it changes the texture of the inconvenience: a watch charged during a morning routine is a different proposition from one that demands a dedicated session. Garmin, which needs the charger far less often, also charges more slowly when it does.

The Bottom Line

Examined as hardware, these are three coherent and genuinely different machines. The Apple Watch Series 11 is a powerful wrist computer that spends its energy budget on capability and integration, accepts a one-day endurance ceiling, and offsets it with fast charging. The Galaxy Watch 8 carries the most advanced process node and the brightest panel, and spends both on features and display rather than longevity. The Garmin Venu 4 subordinates nearly every hardware decision — processor scope, display behavior, even cover glass — to battery life and signal integrity.

Hardware, though, describes only what a watch is capable of. What an owner actually lives with is determined by software and services — the operating system, the app ecosystem, and the subscription layer now attached to all three. That is the subject of Part 3.

원문 기준 / Note: specifications as of May 2026, US configurations.

Photo: Simon Daoudi / Unsplash