More Techs: Samsung’s Smartwatch Is Not Quite Smart Enough

Is the age of the smartwatch dawning? Not just yet, at least if the Samsung Galaxy Gear is any indication. Like other smartwatches currently on the market, it isn’t a standalone product—it’s a companion device for your Samsung Galaxy smartphone or tablet. The Gear is a nice accessory and certainly has potential, but some serious operational snafus make it more of a compelling science project than something worth buying now.

DESIGN, DISPLAY, AND HARDWARE
The Galaxy Gear currently only works with the new Galaxy Note 3 and the Galaxy Note 10.1. Samsung says additional products will become compatible as they’re upgraded to Android 4.3—the Galaxy S 4 is high on the priority list—but they’ll still all be Samsung-only. That makes the Gear a $300 accessory that virtually guarantees your next phone will also have to be from Samsung if you want it to keep working. For this review, we tested the Gear with a T-Mobile Galaxy Note 3.

The bulky Gear measures 1.45 by 2.23 by 0.44 inches (HWD) and weighs 2.6 ounces, not counting the Àexible plastic band. The metal clasp is stiff, but precise; I had to press fairly ¿rmly to close it, but it stayed put, felt
comfortable, and opened without much trouble.

The single best thing about the Gear is its screen. The 1.63-inch square Super AMOLED display features 320-by-320-pixel resolution, vibrant colors, and deep blacks, and is surrounded by a sharp-looking metal frame. On the top side of the band you’ll find a 1.9-megapixel camera sensor, and the right side of the frame holds a Power/Home button; there are no other hardware controls.

One of the reasons the Pebble smartwatch uses an e-paper display is for preserving battery life. The Pebble’s display may be monochrome and lower resolution, but it can stay on continuously. In contrast, the Gear stays dark most of the time to conserve the battery; you shake the watch or press the Power button to wake it up.

Inside the Gear there’s a 800MHz processor, 512MB RAM, Bluetooth 4.0, an accelerometer, and a gyroscope, but no proximity sensor or compass. There’s also 4GB of internal Àash storage for holding apps, photos, and
recorded videos.

CHARGING, SETUP, AND USER INTERFACE
To charge the Gear, inexplicably, you insert it into an included leather cradle that fits just the watch body itself, not the strap. Then you plug the micro USB charger cable into the back of the cradle, and the AC adapter into the wall. It’s easy enough, but ideally you wouldn’t need the cradle at all, and would just plug the charger straight into the Gear.

Samsung says the Gear lasts up to about 25 hours on a charge, depending on how much you use it. With moderate use throughout the day, the watch still had 68 percent battery left the next morning, which is better than I expected, if not quite in Pebble territory.

To get started with the Gear, you need to install the free Gear Manager app on your phone or tablet. You can do this via NFC; just tap the charging cradle to the back of the phone or tablet, at which point it pops up a dialog to install the app. Once you’ve done that, you power up the Gear, tap the cradle to the back of the phone again, and it automates pairing. At this point, I had to agree to several EULAs, as well as update the Samsung Apps store on the phone.

Once powered up, the watch face defaults to showing the time, day, date, and current temperature and weather conditions. There are plenty of custom clocks in the Settings menu, and you can download additional ones from Samsung’s app store (more on this later). Swipe right and you’ll step, somewhat sluggishly, through Noti¿cations, S Voice, Voice Memo, Gallery, Media Controller, Pedometer, Settings, Apps, Logs, and Contacts before returning to the default display. Swipe down and you’ll bring up the camera app; swipe up and you’ll get a calculator.

INTERFACE QUIRKS AND APPS
You can only view one app icon at a time, and there’s no back button—you have to tap the Power/Home button, and that takes you back to the opening screen, which could force you to swipe through multiple screens again to check another setting. Another problem: Every time you wake the Gear from sleep, it returns to the time display—not whatever screen you were on.

Most of the built-in apps work pretty much as advertised; they’re all simple, but nothing special. The Media Controller pops up volume, track skip, and Play/Pause buttons for your phone. Logs shows you recent calls. The Gear picks up your Google contacts from the phone. To exit out of each app, you must press the Power/Home button, or swipe up to go back a page. Notifications shows recent alerts, such as missed calls and text messages, but not software or app updates. There’s no way to check email from the watch, which is an odd oversight.

Seventy additional apps are optimized for the Gear, broken into categories in Samsung’s app store. At publication time, there were four entertainment apps, one ¿nance app, three fitness apps, and a dozen or so each, in the lifestyle, social networking, utilities, and clock categories, with some overlap between the last two. Few of these are interesting, with the possible exceptions of bigger-name titles like Evernote and MyFitnessPal, and Samsung is big on its own ChatOn platform, and there are no real “killer” third-party apps presently available.

VOICE CALLS, CAMERA, AND CONCLUSIONS
For voice calls, there are two built-in microphones, one of which handles noise suppression, and there’s a mono speaker. Voice quality is pretty tinny, and it doesn’t go very loud, though my own voice sounded clear enough
through the mic. Otherwise, S Voice usually recognized my commands, including for voice dialing, but it took several seconds to process each one. You can also dictate text messages, which is as hit or miss as it is on
Galaxy smartphones.

Speaking of pictures, the built-in 1.9-megapixel autofocus camera is fun to use. You activate the camera by swiping down from any home screen, and then fire by tapping the screen on a focus location. It’s pretty fast
to snap off shots outdoors, but slows down to several seconds for focusing indoors. Photos can be 1,392 by 1,392 or 1,280 by 960, and look like those you’ll get from a good front-facing camera on a smartphone:
a little fuzzy, but with decent detail both indoors and out. Exposure compensation was off, though; a shot of a brick building looked fine when it took up the entire photo, but aiming the Gear down a sunny street, I ended up with a lot of dark murkiness in shaded areas.

An icon lets you switch to the camcorder, which you can con¿gure to record 1,280-by-720-pixel (720p) or 640-by-640 H.264 MP4 files. Both sizes of video play smoothly, although there’s no image stabilization. Recording time is capped at 15 seconds per video, which is pretty limiting.

At the moment, there are few smartwatch alternatives as powerful as the Gear, but most are easier to work with. Our current Editors’ Choice for smartwatches is the Pebble, which costs half as much, has a much longer-lasting battery, works with iOS and Android devices, and supports nifty hacks like IFTTT recipes. But the Pebble can’t make calls, and it lacks a color display and a camera. It’s not as ambitious a product, but it’s a lot easier to recommend for what it is.

All told, you’re better off either getting the Pebble now and having fun with it, or waiting for Samsung’s inevitable revisions to the Gear. Some pundits theorize that the Gear makes using Samsung’s huge phones more palatable, but I don’t think that’s going to be a driving factor here; people like Samsung’s huge phones. Really, it’s just that $300 is a lot of scratch to spend on something that is more frustrating than enjoyable to use, and
that needed a longer development and QA cycle. The Galaxy Gear is definitely cooler than I expected, but it’s not worth buying yet.