My Samsung Gear Sport Full Review
(TECH PATROL NEWS) December 27, 2017 - Samsung Philippines launched the Samsung Gear Sport, the latest wearable offering from Samsung. Gear Sport focuses on smart fitness and sports enthusiast, with two colors to choose from. More of that, it can be your personal fitness coach!
Samsung Gear Sport Specifications
- 1.0 Dual Core Processor.
- 1.2″ 360 x 360 Super AMOLED Full Color AOD Gorilla Glass Display.
- Heart Rate Monitor, Accelerometer, Gyro, Barometer, Ambient Light Sensors.
- Bluetooth 4.2, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, GPS/Glonasss, NFC
- 4GB Storage, 768 MB RAM
- 300 mAh (3-4 days) Battery
- 5ATM Mil-STD-810G Standard
- Tizen OS 3.0
- Android OS 4.4+ with 1.5GB RAM+ Compatible
- iPhone 5 with iOS 9.0+ Compatible
- Php 14,990
Display and Design
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| Samsung Gear Sport looks good under any conditions! |
Looking it from afar, the watch looks like a normal watch, whereas you cannot easily determine it whether you are wearing a smartwatch or not.
I asked many of my colleagues, they say that it looks like I am not wearing a smartwatch because of its aesthetics. They also pointed out that the design is commonly found on the imitation smartwatch that they accustomed to. (Blame the imitation makers)
On a serious note, the smartwatch's main body housed with the 316L corrosion resistant stainless steel case. It comes in two colors, the black and blue.
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| Samsung Gear Sport in Striking Blue Color |
On the rear side houses the Heart Rate Monitor, that always measuring your heart rate’s BPM (beats per minute) every 10 minutes.
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| Samsung Gear's Rear side shows the heart rate monitor, that can measure your heart beat per 10 minutes with this green light |
Moreover, the packaging includes a small-sized strap that allows you to install your own 3rd party straps as Samsung implemented the standard 'spring bar' lock mechanism on watch.
In addition, the provided silicon strap is soft comfortable enough to fit on your wrist.
Navigation on Samsung Gear Sport
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| Thanks, @Zeph Cabanilla for the shot! |
You can play around on its rotating bezels for navigation that allows you to browse widgets, songs and other content in the smartwatch. You can also use it’s touchscreen alternatively. If you don't know how to use those, don't worry. A series of tutorial screens will help you to navigate the smartwatch.
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| Just like other mechanical watches, the buttons are placed on the right side of the watch. |
On the right side of the smartwatch, you will see the back button and the home button that has a textured rubber on top for good grip.
Navigating the smartwatch is pretty easy for the first time smartwatch users.Pressing Home button shows your apps and return you to watch face. Pressing and holding it will show you options to turn off the watch and switch to turn on touch sensitivity, ideal if you are wearing gloves. Double pressing it activates S-voice, a voice assistant app by Samsung. Triple press activates it’s SOS feature, which sends an emergency prompt with location information to 4 emergency contacts you have set on the app.
Back button returns you to the previous screen. Press and hold the back button accesses you to Samsung Pay.
In between, you can see a small microphone hole to activate its S-voice commands.
Pressing its buttons, moving its rotating bezel and raising your wrist can wake the smartwatch. Placing your palm above the screen turns off the display.
Rotating its bezel to the left shows you notifications while turning it right shows you widgets you have set. While rotating its bezel, you’ll see some indicators on it. When reached its end or start will give you some vibration feedback.
Hardware
The Gear Sport uses Dual Core Processor on board, (processor model to be confirmed) enough for making multi-tasks operations and other features.It has 4GB of storage (with 1.6+ GB of usable storage) and 768MB of RAM.
Typical Tizen apps on the smartwatch requires less than 3MB for one app.For instance, we installed 1.89MB Spotify app into a smartwatch.
The smartwatch has different sensors onboard. It's Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Barometer, Heart Rate Monitor, Ambient Light works altogether makes the smartwatch more functional and sports-oriented fitness watch.
Location tracking functionality uses GPS/GLONASS sensors, which we find it accurate outdoors, but occasionally suffers indoors. This could be also an issue if you are inside of the building and other structures.
However, Gear Sport has no LTE version, the connectivity, app synchronization from the smartwatch to phone uses Bluetooth 4.2 and Wi-Fi via Samsung Gear Sport app that is available on Google Play Store. You can only make calls, reply texts when your smartwatch is constantly connected to your phone (we will discuss the full functionality and compatibility later).
Moreover, payments will made possible with the use of Samsung Pay and NFC sensor on the smartwatch by adding your supported card/s thru Samsung Pay app. Unfortunately, we couldn't test it yet because it is not yet available here in the Philippines.
Battery Life
It is important to note that Samsung claims a 4-day battery life on its 300 mAh battery capacity on Gear Sport.We have tested the device where the settings are default out of the box, with occasional connecting it to our testing phone, for notifications, synchronization. We do perform also a series of walking and running during the testing period to activate its certain features (which we will discuss it later) which normally a casual person does.
When the battery notifies us a low battery warning on its 16% level, we turned on the power saving mode.
The battery lasts up to 4 days!This is much better with the Gear S3 we reviewed a few months ago. Turning the power saving mode actually helps to make the battery life will last longer.
Although there's power saving mode, apps loaded into smartwatch can be a big factor draining the battery fast. Frequent software updates, app use can also cause to drain it fast as it requires you a lot of restarts from time to time.
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| Charge the Gear Sport with the wireless pod provided |
You can charge the Gear Sport vertically with it's provided wireless charging pod. It will display the estimated time of charging, which we found sometimes not exactly the duration we charged the device.
It displays 2 hours and 30 minutes on the screen, but upon the actual charging, it will sometimes add a few minutes from the estimated time of charging. We recorded 2 hours and 50 minutes with the smartwatch is on. Turning off the Gear Sport when charging it will charge the device for 2 hours and 35 minutes.
Charge your Gear Sport with the out-of-the-box Wireless Pod and the adapter at a normal room temperature. Otherwise, you may get a temperature warning.
Software and Functionalities
Gear Sport runs on Tizen 3.0 Watch OS, which we found intuitive and easy to understand. Upon the first boot of the smartwatch, normally, Samsung pushes many software updates into smartwatch from time-to-time. We had almost 5 software updates installed on the smartwatch. As of this writing, we have pending one. If we get this smartwatch much up-to-date, maybe we can't bring you this full review. It was draining the battery that much, that shifts our focus on its functionality itself as we discussed here.
Interface
The smartwatch has it's own app drawer, where you can see all apps installed displayed in a circular list on the smartwatch. It can be navigated thru rotating bezel or via the touchscreen. In addition, there's also a quick setting that you can pull down where you can control some certain switches in it.Its main interface has a black background by default. Most of all, it makes the texts more stunning with its AMOLED screen. You can customize it also with different backgrounds available. Tizen OS' font on the smartwatch is also customizable on settings.
Customizable Watch Faces
There are 13 built-in watch faces on Gear Sport. Customize it by pressing and holding it into smartwatch face can be downloaded via the Gear App on phone or on the watch itself. Samsung Galaxy Apps offers free and paid wide range watch faces.
Widgets
There are plenty of widgets displayed in the smartwatch's default set of widgets out of the box. That includes kcal burned, steps counter, floor reached, heart rate monitor, minutes you worked out, music widget and more. Pressing each of them will show you a weekly summary of your activity on each day. In addition, you can also add widgets on your own that is available on the app installed on the smartwatch. Most of them are self-explanatory so we don't discuss it any further.
PowerPoint Controller
The Gear sport can be also used as a PowerPoint remote to control the slides of your presentations.
It can be used as your clicker to control and manage your presentations as well. All you need to do is pair your Gear Sport via Bluetooth with a Mac or Windows PC. After that, open your PowerPoint desktop app and it recognized your Gear Sport promptly and proceed with your presentation.
Moreover, Gear Sport can display touch controls. It shows you buttons like go next slide and back on the previous slide. The Gear Sport can be used like a touchpad controller too! You can use the watch's screen to move your cursor to what you want to point on the screen.
Music Playback
You can wirelessly control your current played music. Its default music player works with both default music player on your smartphone and on Spotify Premium. Download the Spotify app on Galaxy app store to access more features like browsing your song on you Spotify account's playlists, songs and control them. In addition, Bluetooth wireless headphones also work perfectly with the Gear Sport.
Compatibility
Gladly, Samsung addresses the incompatibility of the Tizen Watch OS with their previous Gear watch on the Apple's iOS on iPhone. Samsung Health app and Gear app is now also available on iOS too! At some point, some features are available and vary on each platform. We listed down what are the features work and what is not.Compatibility of Gear Sport to Samsung Phone, Android phone, and iOS device.
| Features | Samsung Phone | Android | iOS |
| Notifications | Full Compatibility | Full Compatibility | Full Compatibility |
| Calls | Full Compatibility | Full Compatibility | Not Compatible |
| Messaging | Full Compatibility | Limited Compatibility | Limited Compatibility. Checks only messages |
| Apps | Full Compatibility | Full Compatibility | Not Compatible |
| S Health | Full Compatibility | Full Compatibility | Not Compatible |
| Watch Faces | Full Compatibility | Full Compatibility | Not Compatible |
Fitness Features
Designed to be your a sports companion, Sports Gear is for all, even you are the fitness enthusiast, athletes, a tech guy or just want a convenience in managing your smartphone without opening your phone itself. It monitors how many steps you made for the day. It also detects if you are sitting for a long time and will buzz you to move.Furthermore, if you climb ten feet, the watch coverts to one floor, and notify you accordingly. In addition, when you wear smartwatch overnight, it records your sleep accurately.
Samsung Health App
Like any other fitness watch, smartwatches, the Gear Sport has its own companion app, the Samsung Health. While it is different from the Gear App whereas, the Samsung Health stores all the information and fitness data from Gear Sport.
Upon the first glance of the app, you need to input your height, weight, age and fitness goals you want.
In addition, the Samsung Health can also record your steps with your phone even the Samsung Gear is not with you. Just make sure you have the sensors available on your phone to accurately record your steps, floor reached etc.
Once the smartwatch records all your physical activity, does a synchronization and consolidated the data, the app gives you suggestions, analysis to about your activities to keep your healthy. Moreover, the gear supports fitness apps to track your activities like Under Armor Map my Run and others.
Moreover, the Samsung Gear Sport is the ability to compete interactively with Gear Sport users, compare each other's progress, dare to do the challenges set by the app, which is also a good feature on the smartwatch.
Conclusion and Verdict
At the price point of P14,990, there are many smartwatch to choose from. But the Samsung Gear Sport stands out with several factors.First of all. it's Samsung Health fitness companion app. It does the job very well to keep you fit and healthy. Furthermore, the apps compatibility with smartphone OS and smartwatch also made Gear Sport as a consideration as your fitness smartwatch despite Samsung uses Tizen OS, and it doesn't matter.
Hence, what I like the Gear Sport is a 50-meter water resistant smartwatch and it has a military-standard durability that makes it stand out considering the price point with its obvious rival, the Apple Watch Series 3.
Therefore, the Samsung Gear Sport is your aesthetic fitness companion in achieving your fitness goals and challenge your very best to have the best shape that you can be.
It also your must have tech to burn your holiday fats after the Christmas and New Year celebration.
Pros
- Water resistant up to 50 meters
- Stainless-steel body
- Compatibility of most of the Android phones
- Macho-looking watch
- Solid build
- Interchangeable Straps
- Bright and crisp display
- Long-lasting battery (3 days)
- Sleep tracking is accurate
- Limited compatibility with iOS
- File transfer (e.g. Photos) is albeit rather slow
- Huawei Watch Classic – P19,990
- Huawei Watch Active – P23,990
- Moto 360 2nd Gen – Starts at P16,990
- Samsung Gear S3 – P16,490
- Apple Watch Series 3 – P19,990
