This ancient Samsung smartwatch just got new watch faces

Summary

• The Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 continues to receive updates and new features despite being released in 2019.
• The latest update brings two new watch faces, Perpetual and Stretched Time, to the Watch Active 2.
• Samsung’s commitment to supporting older devices sets it apart from other companies that offer shorter software support for their products.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 is ancient by tech standards, having been released in 2019 with Tizen, an operating system that Samsung has long left behind in favor of Google’s Wear OS. In contrast to Google, Samsung isn’t one to quickly abandon old products just because they aren’t the hot new thing in town anymore. While the Watch Active 2 hasn’t received an update to Wear OS, it still keeps getting new features. This time around, the Watch Active 2 is getting two watch faces straight from One UI 5.

With the latest update to the Wi-Fi version’s firmware R820XXU1FWK2 or the LTE version’s R825FXXU1EWK2, the watch is in for two new looks, as reported by SamMobile. The new watch faces in question are called Perpetual and Stretched Time. They both were a part of the big One UI 5 update for Samsung’s flavor of Wear OS. Perpetual offers a busy look, letting you see all possible months, days, and dates wrapped around the entire watch face. Stretched Time is a lot simpler, showing you only one complication at the bottom, with hours appearing in a big and stretched font — hence the name.

The update doesn’t add any new features other than the watch faces, but it’s still a welcome improvement for a device that is marching towards its fifth birthday this year. SamMobile additionally says that the last full system update the Galaxy Watch Active 2 received was a Tizen 5.5.0.2 update in January 2021. Even then, the watch has received a few more features in the subsequent years all while staying on the same version number.

Given many devices launched in 2019, like Google’s Pixel 4, have long reached end-of-life after just three years of software support, Samsung is once again the company to show the industry how it’s done. In the meantime, a lot has changed, though. These days, many of the best phones out there get updates for four or five years. The Pixel 8 and 8 Pro go even further with their new seven-year policy, giving them full OS upgrades all the way until 2030. It’s likely that Samsung will keep stepping up its game to compete on that front across all of its mobile devices.