Samsung's watches have for some time run on its own Tizen operating system, not that you'd automatically pick this just looking at the Galaxy Watch 3. Installation is a simple enough process across either Android or iOS platforms.
Naturally, Samsung would prefer you to pair the Galaxy Watch 3 with a Samsung phone, and if you do that, there's no additional software to install. For other devices, you'll need to grab Samsung's Galaxy Wear app before you start Bluetooth pairing. If you opt for the LTE model you'll also have to set up an eSIM and compatible phone provider plan at extra cost, but I wasn't able to test that out for the purposes of review.
The Galaxy Watch 3's circular watch face is very much a blank slate when it comes to watch faces, with 19 preinstalled but literally thousands of available watch faces to download from Samsung's Galaxy Store.
You can browse the Galaxy Store from the Galaxy Watch 3 itself, but it's a much more enjoyable process via your paired phone, because you can scroll through more information at once. Either way, there's more scope here for watch face personalisation than on any other smartwatch you could name, and it's not even vaguely close. Yes, some watch faces look abominable to me, but your tastes could vary wildly, and more choice is no bad matter.
Where there's a little less comparative choice, at least if we're comparing against the Apple Watch, is in pure app integrations. It's an area where Apple has been very aggressive in courting developers to produce adjuncts to their iOS apps, but Samsung, of course, can't apply the same pressure to app developers to make Tizen apps just for its watches. Still, there's a nice variety of additional apps in play, with music streaming service Spotify a notable highlight.
Notifications and apps are one part of the smartwatch story, and the other is in fitness tracking. The Galaxy Watch 3 continues Samsung's generally solid story here, with a wide variety of inbuilt exercise tracking options on board, as well as systems for tracking calories, water intake and even stress rates if that takes your fancy.
According to the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3, I'm rather stressed. I probably don't need the Galaxy Watch 3 to tell me this, because, well… have you met 2020?
Likewise the Galaxy Watch 3 can handle sleep tracking, and it does so automatically as long as you keep it on your wrist when you snooze, detecting your motion and recording light, deep and REM sleep modes to give you a more complete picture of your overall sleep health.
Again, my sleep health is pretty lousy, with low sleep "efficiency" and nowhere near enough deep sleep right now. Again, I blame 2020 and probably don't need a watch telling me this, but the value of that data is in building up a positively moving pattern over time anyway.
That aside, the other big flagship features of the Galaxy Watch 3 are largely ones I've not been able to test. It features fall detection, which could be handy in an emergency, but no quantity of hurling myself at my sofa was able to set it off, and I'm not willing to dive headfirst at concrete to see how much force is really required. Call me fussy, but I hate breaking my skull, even in the name of tech reviewing.
The Galaxy Watch 3 also features Blood Pressure and ECG features, but not outside South Korea at this point in time. Like the Apple Watch, there are significant regulatory hurdles to overcome for those kinds of medical-grade features.
Apple reportedly hasn't even bothered to chase up the necessary qualifications in Australia, and it's unclear if Samsung will do so either. As such, they're features that the Galaxy Watch 3 might technically have, but I wouldn't buy one on that basis, because there's no clear timeline on when or if they might become available here.