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Samsung’s browser is now available for its Wear OS smartwatches

Samsung’s browser is now available for its Wear OS smartwatches

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You can install the Samsung Internet browser on the Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic

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The Galaxy Watch 4 Classic and Galaxy Watch 4
Samsung’s latest smartwatches.
Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge

Samsung has brought its Samsung Internet web browser to the new Wear OS-based Galaxy Watch 4 (via 9to5Google). Browsing on a watch doesn’t sound like my ideal way to surf the web for a long period of time, but I could see how it could be useful for small tasks like checking a name or looking up a place.

I don’t have a Galaxy Watch 4, so I can’t give you hands-on experience of how the Samsung Internet browser works. But based on 9to5Google’s testing, it seems like Samsung has thought of some neat tricks to make it possible to navigate the web on your wrist:

An obvious question about a web browser on your wrist is how exactly that tiny, circular display can manage to show full webpages. Samsung’s answer is with gestures. A guide will come up when you navigate to your first webpage that explains a diagonal swipe from either side of the screen will allow users to get to the corners of a webpage. Meanwhile, a swipe up reveals options for bookmarks, “Zoom mode,” and a shortcut to send the webpage directly to your connected phone.

This new browser only adds to what you can already get with the Galaxy Watch 4 series of smartwatches, which we thought were pretty good — as long as you’re already using a Samsung phone, that is. It should be noted that a browser on a smartwatch isn’t new, though; Samsung also has a browser for its Tizen-based smartwatches, and even the Apple Watch has built-in browsing capabilities (though there’s no dedicated Apple Watch version of Safari).