Samsung has taken a leaf out of the Apple Watch playbook with its new Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 line, having released a cool new Walkie Talkie app.
While it doesn’t ship with the company’s latest smartwatches, Samsung’s Walkie-Talkie app is now available to download from the Google Play Store. If you own a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 or a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic, you’ll be able to have a conversation with another person (or more) using only your watch.
As noted by XDA Developers, this may not be the most practical communication tool available to you. For one thing, you’ll need to pair the app with a friend’s nearby smartphone using a pin code.
For another, the push-to-talk nature of those communications might not make for the most flowing conversations.
Samsung isn’t the first to play around with such a walkie talkie smartwatch app concept, either. Apple introduced its own Walkie Talkie app with watchOS 5 in September 2018.
Still, Samsung’s implementation looks to be a cool (and free) feature to play around with on one of the most interesting smartwatch releases of the year. The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 represents the debut of Google’s Wear OS 3, which intriguingly runs underneath Samsung’s own One UI Watch skin.
We found this to be a potent combination in our review. The crisp new UI, allied to speedy performance and classy hardware, finally gives us a device with the potential to take on the mighty Apple Watch 6 at its own game.
Whether it’s got the necessary pizzazz to weather the growing Apple Watch 7 hype is another matter entirely.