Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Samsung Galaxy Gear Review!”.
Hey what is up guys mkbhd here and it’s the end of 2013 and now smart watches are becoming a thing. So this one here is the samsung galaxy gear. It’S the first smart watch from samsung, and it’s probably that smart watch he saw in some commercials somewhere, but it was a pretty good commercial, but the first generation of a product you see out of a company is usually the one you want to pay the most Attention to especially the first product in a new product category like smart watches, so this is the one we’re gon na put under the microscope. First, let’s take a full detailed look at the samsung galaxy gear. At first glance, the galaxy gear appears to be just slightly different from your normal watch, but samsung is calling it the next big thing.
So this is their first in wearable tech and they’ve decided to put it on your wrist as an accessory to your phone and it’ll connect via bluetooth. So as a watch, this is actually quite well built. It’S a solid, rigid plastic band all the way around and a pretty nice clasp design, that’s adjustable to fit even the most extreme wrist sizes like mine and the watch part itself is actually pretty compact. It doesn’t stand out or look as ridiculous, as you might think.
The only button on the entire device is the power button on the right hand, side which can be programmed to do certain things when you double tap it, but a single tap will turn the display on or off and surrounding the whole face of the watch is Surprise, metal, real metal from samsung, so that’s good news and of course, on the actual face of the watch. Instead of the regular analog mechanics, it is a 1.6 inch 320 by 320 oled display and it’s actually objectively very nice. It has a 275 ppi, pixel density and great bright vivid colors. It has an outdoor mode for enhanced brightness, so you can see it everywhere and excellent viewing angles. So you can see it indoors outdoors pretty much whenever you want it’s really nice display. On the back.
You have these pins, which you’ll need to connect to the dock for the galaxy gear, which is actually necessary. It comes in the box and you need it for the nfc pairing setup for the first time and for every time you charge it. So, every time you want to charge your galaxy gear, you have to hook it up to this clasp dock, which has that lovely, faux leather stitching that we love so much and then you’ll plug it. In now around the bottom of the watch.
There’S another metal piece that sits below your wrist and unfortunately this is the only part of the watch that feels a bit bulky and like actually sometimes gets in the way. So when i’m resting my wrist on something or trying to type it kind of, gets annoying, but there’s a reason for this metal piece here there are actually more electronics in there. If you hold it up to the light, you can actually see the electronics wiring going down into the metal.
Clasp turns out this metal clasp contains the speakerphone. Yes, that’s a speakerphone in the bottom, so you don’t actually have to hold the watch up to your face. Like a weirdo to talk on the phone, you can just talk and it’ll hear you, but you do have to hold it like a total weirdo.
However, if you want to take pictures with it like this because uh that’s a camera yeah the bulge on the galaxy gear, is a camera um questionable choice of a feature to add on a watch but hey it’s there, it’s a two megapixel sensor and it can Take square photos that actually you know they look half decent for a watch, and the year can also record up to 15 seconds of 720p video and i’ve noticed that the microphone quality, since it’s meant to be meant for phone calls and a speakerphone. It’S pretty good. You can get an idea of the video quality here. It’S definitely not bad, but at its heart this is an android device, android 4.2 to be specific, and sometimes it’s really obvious but other times, not so much, thanks of course to samsung’s skin that they’ve overlaid on here.
That shows one app per page, but it’s powered by a single core: 800 megahertz processor, half a gig of ram, and it even has four gigs of internal storage and it’s packing a 315 milliamp hour battery. To put that into perspective, this watch actually has very similar computing power to the original motorola droid back in the day, which was a very sizable device, but it has a battery way less than a quarter of the size, and because of that, it can only really Promise you one full day of actual use and you might be able to eat two days out of it. If you really don’t use it all that much standby time is great, but at the end of the day you’re going to have to charge it every single night and as a watch person, that’s usually something people don’t have to do with a watch. So it’s a really big annoyance if you’re used to well only charging one device every night instead of two, but really, though, what can the galaxy gear do? That’S the number one question people have about it when they see it well, okay, number one! It can give you notifications from your phone they’re pretty useless, though, because they don’t actually tell you anything. They just tell you that you have a notification on your phone, which means you have to go check your phone anyway, it’s kind of pointless it’s better with some built-in samsung apps like the samsung mail, app and samsung stock messenger. But not everyone really uses those.
Next up there is s voice to give you commands to your phone, which should, in theory, let you call people and text people from your wrist, but s voice is still s voice and the speech recognition is a bit shoddy and it doesn’t always work all the Time you can take voice, memos and save them to your phone, which is nice, and you also have the gallery which lets you take. Pictures and transfer them to your samsung phone or even share them directly from supported apps in the samsung store which we’ll get to in a second there’s a midi controller, which is actually very useful. It allows you to control the volume and media playback in, like any media app like youtube, spotify soundcloud whatever, so you can control your music while keeping your phone in your pocket and then there is a pedometer to keep track of your fitness and distance traveled and Calories burned. I can also talk to the s health app on your samsung phone, so wearable tech right now really seems to be specializing in fitness, which can be really cool.
Also side. Note the pedometer isn’t very accurate. I mean it’s on your wrist, so you can walk with your hands in your pockets and they’ll somewhat sync up. But if you don’t, then this is a step and this is a step and this is a step and i’m walking what and then there’s the contacts.
The call log and the dialer, so you can place and receive calls on the speakerphone on your watch on your wrist, which is what samsung has really been harping up in their commercials, and i got ta say this feature works perfectly. It basically turns your phone into a bluetooth. Speaker might not be the coolest thing in public when everyone can hear your phone call, but when the phone is in another room and maybe bluetooth is still connected, you can pick up an incoming call without running to go.
Find your phone and lastly, there is a mini, app store that samsung has kickstarted for the galaxy gear and the list of apps in that app store is definitely not very large and there aren’t even that many categories. But then again it’s a watch and hey. There are some nice apps in there.
There are some interesting somewhat usefully functional apps like the watch face applications i really like them, because they, let me actually mess around with the galaxy gears watch face in real time. So that’s nice, but the rest of them are basically miniaturized versions of bigger titles like evernote or snapchat, and there are some pretty big gaps that should obviously be filled later. This is literally a brand new app store, so it doesn’t take any sort of cues from google play at all, but that’s something developers are going to have to fill in the apps on finding and liking, for the galaxy gear are mostly oh. Why didn’t i think of that ideas like stuff like that could really seem like a smart watch is worth getting, but just because you can’t do it on any other form factor doesn’t mean you actually need to right now. It seems like a case of google glass, where the app store doesn’t immediately matter. It’S more just about warming people up to the core functionality of a device with this new form factor and then letting the app store grow and seeing what developers can do with it. Now, up to this point, you may have realized hey. This is all being done through a samsung app on a samsung device and you’d be totally right.
This is actually only compatible with a samsung android device running android 4.3 or later, and there are only two of those right now. The galaxy note 3 and the galaxy note 10.1 tablet and soon the galaxy s4 and the galaxy note 2. But it’s a very small portion of all the devices out there and that is easily the galaxy, gear’s biggest limitation and biggest fault or problem at this point, and it even looks worse when you compare it to its natural competitor, which would be the pebble smart watch Right now, which is compatible with just about any smart watch that has bluetooth so the biggest limitation to the galaxy gear right now physically, is the compatibility. So, at the end of the day, the galaxy gear is definitely a very polarizing and somewhat confusing device.
Just because it’s unclear who exactly was going to buy something like this, because when you consider the watch enthusiasts already, who already all have watches they’re not going to spend 300 on something. That’S like this. But if you consider the tech enthusiasts, who always use their phones.
Why would they put something on their wrist? So, if you’re on the fence about buying something like this, i would say at least wait for the price to drop, because it will mark my words. But if you want to keep waiting the galaxy gear 2 is probably going to be a better option or you could wait from the other smartwatch manufacturers, because google’s probably going to come out with one apple’s, probably going gon na, come out with one sony’s, probably gon Na come out with one and many many more so there’s definitely some future things to look forward to, but since samsung did it first, this is what they can call their pioneer and they can take all the credit for being the first one in the market with It, but i can’t really recommend it for everyone. I can only really recommend it for someone who just has to have it as a sort of a companion or accessory to your galaxy phone. So this is a good entry. It’S a good beginning and it’s a good start and a good sign for the future of smart watches, and it’s definitely got me excited for what we’re gon na see when google takes a stab at it, and many more companies get their game on with smartwatch and Other wearable tech either way, that’s been it.
Thank you for this watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed the review and, if you’re excited for more there’s a subscribe button below you can tap or you can just hit that like button, show your appreciation, but the comments section is what’s most important: it’s open below, if you have any questions, feel free To drop them right there, this has been mkbhd. Thank you for watching and i’ll talk to you guys in the next one peace you .