Smartwatches are cool. They look awesome, have a ton of features, and can really impact the ways we go about our lives. However, since they aim to replace such a trivial thing — the wristwatch; we sometimes don’t give them as much attention as we should. I mean. this isn’t the run-of-the-mill watch that’ll only tell you the time. This bad boy can predict if you’re going to have a heart attack or not — no kidding.

What I’m trying to say is, that this computer on your wrist is far more capable of what you think. In this article, we go over several tips and tricks to make sure you make the most out of your watch.

Also read: WearOS vs Tizen OS: An Android user’s perspective

Filter the noise from your phone

Once you start wearing a smartwatch and suddenly all your notifications are buzzing on your wrist, you’ll realise the amount of noise we put up with on our phones.

Thankfully, the Galaxy Wearables app allows you to tweak what notifications you want on your watch. This not only helps filter out noise but also makes sure you don’t miss out on important notifications.

Go to Settings > Notifications > Manage notifications and check out all unimportant apps. You’ll be surprised by the impact it makes.

Watchfaces: For that extra Oomph!

Probably the coolest part about owning a smartwatch is the fact that you can completely flip the look of the watch in just a few taps.

The huge watch face library over at Galaxy Store combined with watch faces from third-party apps like facer make sure you never run out of style. What’s more? You can even customise each watch face down to your own liking.

Simply head over to the Watch Faces section in the Galaxy Wearables app and select the watch face you want to customise.

Also read: Top 7 Watch Faces for Galaxy Gear and Active

Widgets to make life more convenient

Widgets have proved to be pretty useful — be it PC, Android or smartwatches. Turn your bezel to the right and you’ll run into a preset list of widgets.

Of course, you can rearrange this list and add/remove any widgets you’d like. Speaking from experience, getting this list right will make things a lot more accessible and easier.

To do so, open the Galaxy Wearables app, goto widgets and there can add, remove, reorder to your heart’s content. You can also do this on the watch, but I’d suggest you stick to the phone.

Water lock mode

Fancy a dive with your watch on? No issues, just make sure to turn on the water lock mode. What it does is essentially stop all touch input to the screen.

It’s such a small feature most people overlook. Since the display is touch-sensitive, getting in contact with water can trigger false touches. Simply swipe from the top to open quick settings and the water lock mode is there by default.

Don’t hesitate to use this feature outside of just swimming too. There are a lot of situations in real life that’ll make you want to disable touch input to your watch’s screen.

Also read: Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 vs Watch Active

Reorder and make your smartwatch more efficient

Remember the quick settings page we talked about just now? Well if you want, you can rearrange the settings there or even add or remove the ones you don’t use.

Not just that, the app order in the main menu or even the order in which your watch faces appear, all these can be rearranged and reordered according to your preference. All you need to do is open the Galaxy Wearable app and find the right setting.

Feeling too lazy? Simply tap and hold and can do all that on the watch itself.

Also read: Top 11 Tizen OS apps for Galaxy Gear and Active Watches

A little more customisation has never hurt anyone

Customising watch faces is pretty cool right? Well, what if I told you you can even customise the background style of your watch. Sounds crazy right?

Simply head over to Display > Background style and you can choose from the ten possible options; and boy do they look good.

Lagging much? Managing the memory will help

While for the most part, your watch should work fine, you can run into some lag issues if you’ve got too many apps open in the background. TizenOS does a wonderful job at managing apps but it can only do so much.

If your watch starts lagging, simply press the home button to go to the main menu. Then press the recent apps button and here you’ll be able to see all the open apps in memory. You can close them one by one or all at once and that should free up some memory space.

Alternatively, you can head over to the Galaxy Wearable app, tap on the RAM widget and here you’ll be able to see all open apps and how much CPU/RAM they’re consuming. Press clean now to get rid of them.

Also read: How practical is a smartwatch in daily life?