Gadgetory

Samsung is back in the SmartWatch game with a round SmartWatch that also has a little bit of out-of-the-box thinking it's Josh of agar from Android authority what's going on everybody and here is your full review of the Samsung gear s2 as is the trend these days for smartwatches in the Android space everything is going around and the Samsung gear s2 follows suit you do have silicone bands on this particular version that you're seeing in the case of this gear s2 however the straps are proprietary and latch into the stainless steel body now there is a set of bands that are available in the box if you need to change the overall size of the device and as you can see there already on the back is the heart rate sensor as we already mentioned this is a stainless steel body which makes it feel really nice and there are two buttons on the side where the top brings you back a screen and then the bottom one opens the apps screen or brings you all the way back to home and they flank the microphone but of course the most important part about this round construction is the bezel that goes around this 1.2 inch display that's because it rotates now this rotating bezel is one of the new ways of input that Samsung has put into the gear s2 and it is sublime it is really great to use and we'll get into that in a little bit on the gear s2 classic there is a design on the rotating bezel that makes it a little bit easier to rotate but even on the regular gears too you're seeing here it is not that hard to rotate the bezel at all and although there are usually different sizes now for other smartwatches the gear s2 is going to come into the smaller body right here that kind of finds a happy medium unless you have a really huge risk then you're not going to think that this is a very poultry device but that being said we do think that the stainless steel body adds a little bit of heft to it it's a manageable but still noticeable amount of weight and what's great is that it remains pretty inconspicuous it can go along with pretty much any wardrobe save for maybe the fanciest of suits and it's not until you actually start rotating the bezel or you start using the SmartWatch that people really tend to notice in a year full of great Samsung designs in their hardware at least we do think that the gear s2 follows that tradition as Samsung finally got their SmartWatch right as mentioned before we are working with a 1.2 display that comes in at 360 by 360 resolution and is made of Samsung's signature Super AMOLED tech now this tech does allow for a couple of different benefits not only does the ambient light display allow for some battery savings but it also allows for some pretty high saturated colors there are all of the different icons and the home screens that are available in Tizen underneath the surface but they did run into a couple of difficulties regarding this display now there are some applications that haven't been adapted to this new round design just yet and it shows when you actually get into the menus and options for them one example in particular is the watch face I like to use on here when I want to actually cater it to the color and everything that I want you can see that a lot of the different menu options are just cut off by the round display but all in all we will always like AMOLED for smartwatches because it does provide a couple of power benefits as well as a good display experience overall a one gigahertz processor with half a gigabyte of RAM powers the Tizen software in the gear s2 and happens to do so quite swimmingly really if you used any Samsung Tizen powered wearables in the past then you probably notice a little bit of stutter but that has been completely eliminated here in the gear s2 even going through among all of the different elements whether you're swiping or using the bezel provides a very good snappiness and it's almost as if all of the elements actually click into place the same way that you would hear the click the satisfying click from that rotating bezel but it's in hardware that we get some of the extras and we'll start off with the microphone the microphone found right over here between the two buttons provides the ability to do voice actions voice dictation and voice commands but you're not going to be taking any calls on the gear s2 because there's no speakerphone or even connections to cellular networks there is a 3g version of this device but we'll get into that in just a second what I will say is that the voice actions and voice dictations on here can be pretty nice especially when you're replying to messages but s voice in this Tizen powered SmartWatch happens to be pretty limited when you compare it to other iterations like Android wear connectivity is done through a Bluetooth connection to a smart phone and I say smart phone because it doesn't actually have to be a Samsung device anymore what you have to do if you're using anything like say a moto X or any non Samsung device is just install the Samsung gear plug-in and manager in order to get the gear s2 to work which is awesome but the other nice feature on here which has been sort of becoming a thing with Android wear also recently is that this is also a Wi-Fi powered version of the watch if you haven't have your phone somewhere else or you'll leave it at home but you still have a Wi-Fi connection that the gear s2 can connect with then both of these devices can still sync up now it requires both of the devices to be connected to a Samsung Account but still it's nice to be able to get your notifications even when your phone happens to not be in your pocket or even anywhere near you Bluetooth also gets a boost as you are able to move music local files over to the gear s2 now this is another nice feature if you want to leave your phone at home and let's say you want to go out for a jog but you still want to have your music on you you can pair a Bluetooth headset to the gear s2 and you'll be able to enjoy your music on the go without even needing to have your phone anywhere on your person speaking of jogging Fitness is also an important part of these wearables and in the gear s2 you get s health now s health at its basic level is mostly just a tracker it will be able to track your steps throughout the day and you can actually input your water and caffeine intake but as a sort of coach the gear s2 is actually able to track your heart rate during a particular workout and make sure that you're still in your fat-burning zone now while they will be able to sync up with the s health application on whatever smartphone you happen to be using it also is able to store your workouts inside of the watch itself but the problem here is that if you want to use the watch as a standalone device and track let's say the type of run that you did and where you went there's no GPS on the Wi-Fi only version of this device you have to have your phone on you so it can track your location the 3G version of the watch will have it but that is going to be a different purchase obviously that you might have to wait for GPS omission aside one of the other bad parts about Fitness on the gear s2 is the fact that it doesn't yet support some of the really popular applications that are out there and of course it's up to developers to put things like run keeper or endomondo on here but if you have the Nike app you can always use that because it's already built in or if you happen to use s health and you do like it and you can use that as well but there are a lot of runners out there who are kind of set in their ways and the gear s2 is not going to be the best companion for and finally in battery Samsung has done well to include a nice magnetic dock that allows the watch to still be used as some sort of like a nightstand clock and basically you just have to lie the watch down onto the magnetic charging dock and it will charge from zero to 100 in just over an hour and perhaps it's because of the Super AMOLED construction but a 250 milli amp hour battery is still able to power this device for more than a day which is better than a lot of other wearables out there while we weren't able to get past the 2 day mark basically we had to plug it in every other night it was still pretty nice once you had a lot of the brightness settings down and maybe you turned off the ambient display to be able to get this watch to work even if I forgot to charge it on any given night that said however it's probably a good idea to still charge the device every single night just so you're not going to want for power in the middle of your next day and finally in software you have Tizen Samsung's own proprietary software that they bring to the SmartWatch game and that brings with it good and bad things first let's start off with the good Tizen is a breath of fresh air when compared to all of the different Android wear smartwatches that are out there and it brings a sort of different look at how you can perform on your SmartWatch especially when you factor in that rotating bezel the rotating bezel along with the two buttons on the side and of course your touch and swipe allow for a marriage of inputs of sorts so it actually feels a lot more intuitive because when you know that the rotating bezel is how you can get around then users kind of just gravitate towards it and of course you can just tap in the middle to get into various elements and then use the back and apps buttons to get to other functions Tizen also adds in a number of extra functions that maybe we should have had in other SmartWatch ecosystems for instance input when it comes to text allows you a lot of choice if you get a message and you want to reply to it there are a bunch of built in emojis and there are also canned responses that you can cater to in the gear manager but there's also even a t9 keyboard now let's not get it twisted here the t9 keyboard is not all that fun to use and it's kind of hard to use even and you're not going to use it unless you can actually sit down and really pinpoint exactly where you're touching on the screen but otherwise it is a nice addition that allows a little bit of extra choice which brings us to the bad about Tizen unfortunate it's full application support it's nice for them to be able to support replying to various messaging applications but after that the list is really bare one look in the gear manager shows you ESPN Bloomberg Yelp which in and of itself is a great example of how awesome certain applications would look in Tizen with this rotating bezel but after that it kind of ends productivity apps like Evernote are missing and even support for full Google Maps in order to look at your navigation or missing as well and what's this hardening is that Tizen is still considered a fringe ecosystem developers might not be able to get their applications on to the gear s2 and future devices like it because Android wear is still considered the standard in the Android Market the Samsung gear s2 comes in at 299 dollars with its gear s2 classic brethren coming at 349 which puts it squarely among all of the other Android wear offerings available now but isn't enough to justify the price of course that's going to be up to you but at least for us here at Android authority we have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Samsung gear s2 while we absolutely love the design and the hardware and really this is the best-looking SmartWatch that Samsung has ever made unfortunately everything underneath the surface is just somewhat lacking even if we were to pick up the gear s2 and use it as our SmartWatch during the day we would get frustrated later on when we realize that one or many of the functions that we would want in an Android wear SmartWatch for example just don't work as well on here yet what gets us excited about the gear s2 is that we might see more devices adopted these kinds of input this rotating bezel was just absolutely ingenious and Samsung deserves a lot of credit for that but with this particular SmartWatch without to the full application support it unfortunately goes a few steps forward but it still comes back a couple of steps as always thank you guys very much for watching and hope you enjoyed this review of the Samsung gear s2 it's a great SmartWatch we actually love wearing it and the hardware design are top-notch by Samsung but unfortunately the places that it kind of falls short are the places where it counts the most and unfortunately that's the reason why we can't recommend it more than some of the Android wear smartwatches that we have seen this year nonetheless keep it tuned to you for even more about it and everything from my colleagues in Android make sure you subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and drop us likes on these videos because we'd love to see the thumbs up when you're done with that don't forget that we have a podcast the Android authority podcast discussing topics in Android every single week and then you can head on over to Android or decom because we are your source for all things Android