Heart rate and battery

The watch can measure your heart rate, calories, steps and distance during a match. All of it can be switched off, individually, and mid-match — the scoring path depends on no sensor.

Reach it by the Settings row at the bottom of the screen before a match, or from the Settings row of the match menu.

What is measured stays on the watch unless you connect a club account and consent to that club holding it — see Your club.

Power profiles

Every 30 s is the default because a three-hour match is the design target. A reading every half minute still draws a curve worth looking at; a watch that dies in the third set is useless.

The number beside a profile's name is how often a reading is kept: that is what the curve shows at the end of a match, and what goes to a club if you send it. On Continuous the sensor samples more often than that — five seconds is the curve.

The notification during a match

While a match or a session is running, the watch shows an ongoing notification saying so. It is not an alert — it never buzzes and it cannot be swiped away — and it does two jobs. It shows you that a measuring match is keeping the app running in the background, which you are entitled to see rather than have to trust. And it is what tells the watch that there is something on screen worth keeping there when your wrist drops, which is why the score stays on the dimmed screen instead of the watch face taking over.

It is there for every match, including one played on Scoring only with every sensor off. That was not always true, and the version where it was not is the version where dropping your arm mid-match lost you the score — on exactly the setting somebody chooses to make the battery last.

If you have refused notifications for Courtovo, there is nothing to post, and then the watch face does take the screen back when your wrist drops. Scoring is unaffected either way: every point is saved before it appears.

Choosing a profile sets the switches below it to that profile's own. You can then flip any of them individually — a profile is a shortcut, not a constraint.

The individual switches

Heart rate, Calories, Steps and Distance each switch on and off separately, during a match too. Whatever was already measured is kept.

A heart-rate limit

Settings → Heart-rate limit, directly under the heart-rate switch. Pick a number, in steps of five, or leave it at No limit, which is where it starts.

Above it, your heart rate is drawn in amber — above the score and on the training dial — and the watch gives one long buzz. That is the whole feature, and it is two halves of one thing: a colour without a buzz is missed by someone out of breath, and a buzz without a colour leaves you wondering what buzzed.

Things worth knowing before you rely on it:

• It is not a health monitor. It is a training limit you chose. The app makes no medical claim, does not suggest a number, and does not work one out from your age — a formula like "220 minus your age" is off by around eleven beats for a typical person, and a confident wrong maximum is worse than none.
• It waits for three readings in a row above the number. A heart rate read on the arm that holds the racket jumps with grip and impact, and one jump is not your heart. On Continuous that takes about 15 seconds; on Every 30 s about a minute and a half. On Scoring only nothing is measured, so there is nothing to compare — the row is greyed while heart rate is switched off.
• It buzzes once per crossing, and not more than once every five minutes. The colour stays until you are five beats back under the number, so sitting right on it does not flicker. Go over again within five minutes and the colour returns without a buzz.
• There is no lower limit. You are below any sensible floor every time you pick up balls or change ends, so a floor would go off all match.

The limit is a setting kept on the watch. It is not uploaded and changes nothing about what is measured or stored.

Permission

Measuring needs the watch's sensor permission. The app asks the first time you start a match with measuring switched on — not at first launch, when there is nothing to decide about yet.

If you decline, everything keeps working and nothing is measured. The settings screen says so next to the switches it affects. That is a normal state, not an error.

What you see after a match

In the match detail: average and maximum heart rate, calories, steps, distance.

If nothing was measured it says so, rather than showing empty rows — blanks read like something broke.

Venue

Switch Venue on and the watch takes a single location fix when the match starts. It records no track — one point, answering which court you played on.

This is the one capture that is off by default: it is the most sensitive data here, and the least useful to somebody who always plays at the same club.

• The match does not wait for it. The search runs in the background and the fix is attached to the match whenever it lands. It gives up after 20 seconds; indoors that is usually not enough, and that is fine.
• If there is no place, the match detail says why: no location permission, location off on the watch, no signal within 20 seconds, or the watch could not find the place.
• Coordinates are shown to three decimals, about a hundred metres. Enough to name a place, and no more than that needs.
• If the fix is vague (worse than 200 metres) the detail view says so.

Name the place

In the match detail, tap the Venue row and type or dictate the name of the court. The name then replaces the coordinates. It is the only thing you can change about a match already played — because it changes no result.

Measuring without playing a match

Sometimes you want the numbers and there is no match: a warm-up, a fitness session, a hit against a wall. Training is the second row before a match, under Start match.

It records what a match records — heart rate, calories, steps, distance, how long you went — and nothing else. There is no score to keep, no opponent to name and no winner, so the screen belongs entirely to the figures. It appears in your history under the name of the sport you have set — Gym, Golf, Running — with how long it lasted where a scoreline would be, so a week later you can still tell one row from another. With no sport chosen it simply says Training, as before.

The dial

One figure is drawn large in the middle, the others sit around it, and the middle is the one you chose. Turn the bezel — or the crown — to move a different figure into the middle; one turn moves it by one place, forwards or backwards. Your choice is remembered for the next session too.

Distance is in metres and kilometres unless you say otherwise. Settings → Units offers Watch region, Metric and Imperial; Watch region is the default and follows the country your watch is set to. Imperial shows yards below a mile and miles above it, the same way metric switches at a kilometre. It changes only what you read: what the watch measures, and what it sends to your club, is in metres either way.

Under each figure is the smallest thing that says what it is — its unit where it has one (bpm, kcal, m, km), and a symbol where it has none: a stopwatch for the elapsed time, a footprint for the steps. The number itself never carries the unit, so nothing has to shrink or wrap to make room for three letters.

A figure the watch is not measuring is not on the dial at all: with the sensors off you get the elapsed time on its own and a line saying so, rather than four zeroes. It comes back the moment a reading arrives.

The time of day is at the top, always. A session is the one screen that takes your watch face's place for an hour at a time, and the watch face's whole job is the time — so it goes back, small and quiet above the figures. It is not one of the figures: the bezel never lands on it, it never takes the middle, and it does not count as something being measured, so a session with the sensors off still says so. Your watch decides whether it reads 14:38 or 2:38 PM; there is nothing to set here.

Ending the session is behind the back button, or a swipe from the left edge, exactly like the match menu. Nothing on the dial itself can be tapped, which is the point — there is no button for a stray touch to find while you are moving.

The menu has two rows: Back, which returns you to the dial, and End training. Back is there because a Galaxy Watch's side buttons belong to the system: with only the red row showing, leaving the menu would be possible solely through a gesture nobody was told about. A left-to-right swipe takes you back from here too. The session keeps running while the menu is open — opening it pauses nothing and interrupts no measurement.

The court-time warning works here too. If you started from a booking and set a warning, the watch buzzes the same number of minutes before your court is due back, whether you are playing a match or training on it.

A training session goes to your club only under a consent of its own. It is not covered by the one about matches: agreeing to share what your watch measured during a match is not agreeing to share every session. Joinovo asks you separately, per club, under your profile's privacy settings. Until you say yes there, sessions stay on your watch.

When you have, a finished session is sent whole — how long it lasted, your lowest, average and highest heart rate, the calories, the steps, the distance and the heart-rate curve — to the club selected on your watch. Only you can see it. Withdrawing that consent stops future sessions and deletes the ones that club already holds, exactly as it does for matches, and withdrawing one of the two consents never touches the other.

A session with nothing measured on it is never sent anywhere. You played with the sensors off, or the watch never got a reading — either way there would be nothing in it. A session is its measurement, which is why there is no way to send one without one.

If the app is closed or the watch restarts mid-session, it ends where it stopped and keeps what it had measured up to then. Nothing waits to be resumed, because there is nothing half-scored.

What it cannot do

• No heart rate? A loose strap, a cold wrist or a tattoo can leave the sensor with nothing. Then nothing is shown — never a zero, because zero is not a heart rate.
• Distance is an estimate. Tennis movement — short, lateral, full of direction changes — is exactly what wrist-derived distance handles worst. Until its accuracy has been measured, do not read more than an order of magnitude into it.
• With the screen off, measuring continues and the score goes with it: while a match or a session is running — measuring or not — the current score appears on the watch face and on the recents card, and tapping it comes straight back. When the screen dims, the match stays on it in a stripped-down rendering — a few large figures on black, not a dimmed copy of the bright screen.