Samsung could double the amount of onboard storage with the Galaxy Watch 7

What you need to know

• Samsung is expected to launch the Galaxy Watch 7 this summer in three different models.

• A new leak claims that Samsung will offer the Galaxy Watch 7 series with double the amount of onboard storage as the Galaxy Watch 6 series.

• While the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 shipped with 16GB of storage, this report says the Galaxy Watch 7 will feature 32GB.

Smartwatches are usually gauged by features like display, battery life, and fitness tracking functionality. Storage doesn't appear to be as important in a wearable as, say, an Android phone. But it's still a crucial spec that dictates how many apps, songs, and other things you can store for offline use. That's why Samsung is planning to double the amount of onboard storage offered on the Galaxy Watch 7 series, which is expected to launch this summer.

SamMobile reports that Samsung will offer the Galaxy Watch 7 in three different versions, confirming earlier rumors. What's new is that the Galaxy Watch 7 is now expected to include a storage upgrade. While the Galaxy Watch 6 was offered with 16GB of storage, this will reportedly be doubled to 32GB on this year's upcoming smartwatches. With smartwatches, plenty of the processing power and storage is offloaded to a paired smartphone, but there are still benefits to the extra storage.

For starters, Wear OS takes up a significant amount of a smartwatch's total available storage. If a device like the Galaxy Watch 6 includes 16GB of storage, only about 10GB of that will be usable space after the OS is installed. It's also important to consider that prior leaks have suggested that the Galaxy Watch 7 series will be powered by Wear OS 5. The next version of Wear OS will all but certainly take up more space than Wear OS 4, further cutting into smartwatch storage. This could be part of the reason Samsung decided to bump the storage capacity of the Galaxy Watch 7 series to 32GB.

The increased capacity also benefits music lovers, as there will be more gigabytes available to store your favorite songs and albums. This comes in handy when you want to listen to music while offline, which helps with phone-free workouts. Although smartwatch apps are usually small in size, more storage means you can fit more apps on a Galaxy Watch. Plus, though they're virtually negligible in terms of storage usage, you can fit more watch faces with extra capacity.

Additionally, SamMobile claims that Samsung plans to alter the model number pattern of the Galaxy Watch 7 series. The report says that SM-L300 and SM-L305 represent one model, SM-L310 and SM-L315 account for another, and the premium model uses SM-L700 and SM-L705. SamMobile also suspects that the model numbers ending with "5" could signify support for cellular connectivity. This corroborates an earlier rumor that the Galaxy Watch 7 would come in three variants, with each version having a separate cellular option.

The exact release date of the Galaxy Watch 7 isn't known yet, but the Galaxy Watch 6 series debuted in August 2023.