- Samsung’s aging Galaxy Watch 4 is vulnerable to a display failure where the screen turns solid red.
- The only solution for affected hardware seems to be a screen replacement.
- While failures have been happening for years, it’s hard to ignore a recent surge in reports.
It’s sure looking like we could only be just a few more weeks away from getting our formal introduction to Samsung’s next-gen smartwatches, the Galaxy Watch 8 series. And while we’re excited to check out the new design this year, we’re also happy to see Samsung keeping up its support for its older wearables, preparing its One UI 8 Watch update for them now. Inevitably, though, the very oldest will one day be left behind, and it’s looking like we’re getting to that point for the Galaxy Watch 4. And maybe that’s why the recent string of device failures we’ve been hearing about feels all the more frustrating.
Electronics break, and with mobile devices especially, the threats can be nearly constant — it’s a small miracle that we’re not constantly smashing smartwatches on doorknobs. And when it comes to Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 4, one failure mode we’ve known about seems to manifest as an orange/red screen that’s otherwise non-responsive. Users have been running into this occasionally for years, as we see in this 2023 Reddit post from rrrocky777, or this 2024 post from SoaibMostafa on Samsung’s own support forums.