Quick Links
I was skeptical of smartwatches, but the Galaxy Watch made me a believer. I only just now started using gestures, and I can’t believe what I was missing out on. You might be, too.
I Can Dismiss My Morning Alarm With a Pinch
I love using my smartwatch to set my morning alarm. My watch is already on my wrist as I’m getting into bed, and I don’t have to hunt for it when my alarm starts going off. It trumps using my phone, but it still has its downsides.
As someone who sleeps with a partner, it can be annoying to use my other hand to turn off my smartwatch’s alarm. I sometimes have to carefully maneuver not to shove my watch in my wife’s face first thing in the morning. A phone, by comparison, is something easy to pick up and dismiss with one hand.
Gestures make my morning alarm something I can also dismiss with one hand. When the alarm goes off, all I need to do is pinch my index finger and thumb together twice.
For whatever reason, this gesture isn’t enabled by default. You can find this gesture, and all the other awesome ones we’re about to get to, by hitting up the “Button and Gestures” section of Samsung’s Wearable app.
Is the watch able to detect every time I pinch? No. Instead, I have to train myself to pinch in precisely the way the watch knows how to detect. It feels like an overly exaggerated pinch, much like how talking to a voice assistant involvespulling out my extra-enunciated voice. Sometimes, I get frustrated and simply pinch over and over again until the alarm stops. Yet even then, I still find this easier than having to reach over with my other hand. I call it a win.
End Timers and More With a Shake of the Wrist
Timers are one of the primary reasons I fell in love with my smartwatch. I set timers all throughout the day when steeping tea. I set timers when meditating.Sometimes, I try to findthe best Pomodoro app, but I often end up going back to the timer baked directly into my watch.
Until now, dismissing those timers has been a two-handed affair. Now, I can end them just as easily as my alarm. Turns out, I can dismiss timers by twisting my wrist twice. This I find to be a much more responsive gesture. Two twists usually do the job.
At this point, I learned something else special. I can dismiss my morning alarm using this same gesture. Likewise, I can dismiss timers by double-pinching. That’s not to say that the two gestures are interchangeable. We’ll come back to that.
Knock Knock to Quickly Launch a Favorite App
My Galaxy Watch 6 comes with a few physical shortcuts available to launch specific apps. I can launch an app by double tapping on the top button, for example. I currently have this shortcut set to launch timers since I set so many of them.
Gestures open up a way to make another app almost as easy to access. This requires the knock-knock gesture, which resembles knocking on a door.
Say you want to see your recent text messages. You can set Google Messages to open whenever you perform a knock knock. I find this to be a nice way to open an app that I don’t use often but want to be quickly accessible in those occasions when I do.
The gesture takes practice, and it only works while the screen is on. It doesn’t respond to every knock, but with exaggeration and practice, the watch figures it out.
Samsung Has Sprinkled Gestures All Throughout the Watch
The Samsung Wearable app explicitly calls out the three gestures I’ve listed, but the first two pop up in places you may not expect. They’re sprinkled into apps where they just make sense.
If I’m using my smartwatch as a remote shutter, I can double pinch to activate the shutter button.
When someone calls, I can answer the call by double pinching my fingers, or I can dismiss the call by twisting my wrist. If I set a stopwatch, I can pause and unpause the timer by double pinching. When I’m listening to music, if the media controls are visible on my watch, I can double pinch to pause and double pinch again to unpause.
You get the idea. The pinch gesture becomes the go-to gesture for “do the obvious thing I want to do right now” and twisting my wrist tells the watch “make this thing go away.” It’s an incredibly intuitive way to interact with a watch.
You Can Actually Navigate The Entire Watch With Only Gestures
The gestures I’ve dived into are the ones that Samsung makes easily accessible in the Samsung Wearable app or has baked directly into One UI. These are far from the only gestures my watch is able to recognize.
In fact, there are many gestures built into Google’s Wear OS itself. It’s possible to navigate the entire watch using gestures, an accessibility feature included since not everyone has the ability to use two hands.
The options here include a few additional movements, like opening and closing your fist or shaking your fist from side to side. These gestures give you a deep level of control, allowing you to customize just how much you want to be able to do with one hand.
Personally, this is more in-depth than I need, but it’s worth a shout-out for anyone who wants to go deeper. Since these gestures are part of Wear OS, they’re also available on non-Samsung smartwatches.
I love these gestures, and I now consider them to be a reason to buy a Galaxy Watch. They remind me of the gestures included in Motorola phones like the double-chop to activate the flashlight. Would I ever think to turn on the light that way? No. Do I miss it whenever I use any other phone? Absolutely.
Samsung’s Galaxy Watches were long considered the best Android watches around. Lately, the competition has gotten fierce. Thelatest Pixel Watch won a lot of people over. The OnePlus Watch 3 isa game-changer when it comes to battery life. But setting aside the other thingsI like about the Galaxy Watch, the gestures alone make me want to keep one on my wrist.
