Gadgetory

a while back well quite a while back actually Sampson came up with their version of a fitness tracker that wasn't quite a watch was more like a band that could be used to track everything from steps to your actual workouts it was a nifty little device and since then there have been a lot of fitness trackers that have come out of the woodwork so now there is a second version of that device and Samsung hopes that it's going to replace the ones you might already have on your wrist but it's a good enough to do that well it's Josh freghar from Android thority what's going on everybody and this is the Samsung gear fit 2 so now we have a second version of the gear fit and it looks a lot like the first one actually but of course there are a number of enhancements these straps that are available come in small and large sizes with the gear fit module in the middle and you're going to have to use those kinds of bands if you want to change the color and those will be available online but it's a pretty simple band you just throw it around your wrist and there's a simple little nub on one of the bands that goes into the holes on the other band and it's really easy to get it onto the wrist ends especially if you have the right size of band it's going to fit pretty much any type of wrist out there the module itself just sits plainly on the top of the wrist and you're going to be looking at a lot like a watch and the screen is one point eight four inches with the optical heart rate sensor on the other side of it so a couple of buttons and they feel really nice and meaty but basically the buttons are just the extra modes of navigation one of them to go backwards in the interface and the other one used to go back to the home screen overall it's a good looking device and it falls in line with a number of the other fitness trackers that you might see out there obviously this is not going to look like a watch or any of the smartwatches that are out there but that's not the point of it that's why it's called the gear fit it's supposed to be in line to sort of tackle the fit bits of the world if you will but as far as the look and feel go it's very easy to put onto the wrist like I said already and it's kind of inconspicuous even though it's for in fact already makes it clear it is made for fitness it's a pretty nice screen in that it shows all of the information that you need on there especially for the fitness tracking but when it comes to notifications if you have longer forms of text on here they are going to end up getting truncated so you're not going to see the entire message for short form messages and emails it's going to be really easy to read everything on your just by scrolling up and down on the message and then after that you'll be able to hit on to either replying to the message via some canned responses or you can open it up on the smart phone itself yeah pretty much all the hardware you would need in the gear fit - including GPS which does take a little bit to lock on to the subject but once it's logged on you can track where you're going in your run or your hike or your walk there's Bluetooth which is the main way that it connects to a smartphone and thankfully the gear manager and the S health apps are available on the Google Play Store so you can get this connected to pretty much any Android device and also with Bluetooth you can connect a Bluetooth headset to just the gear fit - and any local music files that you put into the four gigabytes of storage on the gear fit - can be listened to straight from here so you don't necessarily need to have your phone on you at all times for your workout after that you have all the different sensors that are used to track the movements and to register certain movements if you do certain workouts inside of this device and finally you have the battery at 200 milliamp hours which works for about three days if you're using this regularly but in my case I actually had the gear fit - not paired to a smart phone so without having to go through notifications and anything like that it actually was able to last for about five to six days the harvey mater on the back here is obviously optical which means that it's not going to necessarily be as accurate as other heartrate monitors especially ones that you would strap onto your chest but it is used for a number of the workouts just not all of them so if you're going to be doing cardio based workouts for the most part like running or walking then you'll be able to use the heartrate to more accurately track how many calories you're burning this unfortunately was not ideal when it comes to other activities that I like to do I'm more of a weightlifter which means that I prefer to track my heart rates during activities like that but when you go into the activity tracker and you pick something like other workout it simply does not use the heart rate monitor at all so that does kind of suck if you want to use the heart rate monitor for more than just jogging running walking or hiking kind of like what I'm doing right now there are actually some extra workouts available lower on the list including squats crunches and other bodyweight exercises and the sensors on the gear fit - will basically be firing off so that it knows when it goes up or down and registers that as a movement in this workout it's kind of nice to have if you want to be able to track how many squats you've done but of course it's not necessarily you know for anyone else who is morning to fitness but thankfully the gear fit to actually is able to automatically tell when you're doing a certain type of activity if I did not turn on the gear fit - to track the workout that I'm doing right now it would be able to tell that I'm jogging a certain distance and I'm jogging in general and be able to track that and put it towards the activity that is then put into s health and as far as the heart rate monitor goes it is able to track a resting heart rate every 10 minutes or so so you'll be able to get a nice snapshot throughout the day of what your fitness kind of looks like but the heart rate monitor unfortunately for workouts like this and for more intense workouts in general unfortunately it's not quite as accurate now that is something that we would expect from a finished tracker like this that is wrist mounted but unfortunately it is one of the less accurate ones when compared to a chest mounted heartrate monitor it was more than a dozen beats per minutes off of the mark when compared to something like a polar that is strapped on to the sternum and speaking of automatic tracking the gear fit - can track sleep essentially when there's no movement being registered on the device it will say that you are sleeping now these graphs that are in s health are kind of useful to see what your sleep cycles are but ultimately it's just a kind of a glimpse into how long you slept and according to the gear fit - how efficient your sleep was but there's one big feature that's missing from the gear fit - that I think is important to have for any SmartWatch and fitness tracker the ability to have an alarm using the vibration feedback oh so it pretty much comes down to this the gear fit to is a good daily activity tracker but it's not necessarily a very good fitness tracking solution for any fitness enthusiasts out there who already have wonderful working fitness trackers for more intense workouts the gear fit - simply not going to give you exactly what you need to replace those but if you just need to check how much water or caffeine you've been in taking what kind of sleep you've been getting and also how much regular activity like walking and perhaps some more cardio based workouts you've already been doing every day if you want to know what that information is like than the gear fit - can provide that especially considering that s-health has actually grown a lot since the original gear fit thankfully the price of the gear fit - means that a lot of users can get started in the fitness world using this as a daily activity tracker but again if you're a fitness enthusiast you probably have something already that you're using and this is not going to replace it keep it in - and row 34 even more and also more on Fitness trackers in the Android space including future devices from people like Samsung and then you can stick around and visit our sibling sites including VR source tab times and sound guys if you want to delve outside the world of Android and then you can stick around by subscribing to this channel if you haven't already and by heading over to Android authority comm because we are your source for all things Android