Galaxy Watch Ultra’s Double Pinch Gesture is My New Favorite Thing

When it comes to smartwatches, the watch I can’t get off the wrist at the moment is without a doubt the Galaxy Watch Ultra. While big and goofy, it has excellent battery life and is a truly stellar fitness device that keeps track of everything I need with the smarts to help me manage my day too. You should read our review for it if you haven’t.

As someone who hasn’t found Samsung’s watches to be that likable in recent years, I’ve missed out on some fun changes. One of those are the new gestures that Samsung introduced last year as a part of the Wear OS 4 and One UI 5 Watch update. Specifically, I’m talking about the Double Pinch move that makes dealing with things on the wrist such a simple process now.

For those who missed it, the idea is this – as notifications roll in, music plays, calls pop-up on your watch, etc. you can double pinch your fingers together to interact with those items. It works so well, at least on the Galaxy Watch Ultra, but I’d imagine it does on other watches too.

DOUBLE PINCH GESTURE FEATURES: As I’ve found this gesture to be incredibly useful, I mostly use it when notifications from something like my Eufy cameras arrive or any others that don’t have “reply” actions within them. These notifications can be scrolled through and dismissed by simply pinching your fingers a couple of times. For those with the option to reply, like a text message or Gmail notification, the pinch can scroll and then pop open a keyboard to let you reply by voice, all without every touching your smartwatch or phone. So yeah, you can probably imagine how awesome this can be when carrying on messaging conversations or needing to dismiss all of the notifications that roll through your watch in a day.

This gesture can also help you take pictures with Samsung phones. I’m not using a Samsung phone, so I can’t give you feedback there. It should work, although you apparently need to open the camera app on wrist and phone in order for that to happen.

You can pause/play and control media playback on some level too, although I haven’t found this useful yet or been able to get it to work in testing. However, the gesture is super handy for timers and the stopwatch for pausing/resuming or stopping. Answering calls (and ending them) can happen this way too, which again, is super useful if you were out walking or on a bike or something and don’t want to use both hands to touch anything.

Basically, if there is an action button within a watch app or notification, double pinching your fingers together can make magic happen. The watch attempts to let you know when it’s available by showing you a little hand-pinching animation on the buttons it will work with (you can see it below).

HOW TO TURN ON GALAXY WATCH DOUBLE PINCH: The thing is, you probably won’t find this setting turned-on out of the box, so you’ll need to do that. To find the Double Pinch gesture, as well as all of the other gestures, here’s where to look:

1. Open the Galaxy Wearable app on phone
2. Tap “Watch settings:
3. Tap into “Buttons and gestures”
4. Scroll to the “Gestures” setting and look for “Double pinch”
5. Toggle this on or tap on it to see a tutorial
6. Feel free to turn on “Shake to Dismiss” or “Knock knock” for additional gestures too

And that’s it. If you own a Galaxy Watch 4, Galaxy Watch 5, Galaxy Watch 6, or the new Galaxy Watch 7 or Galaxy Watch Ultra, consider turning these on.