Gadgetory

the SmartWatch game has really heated up coming into the end of the year but now we have our hands on the brand new Samsung iteration of their Tizen powered SmartWatch hey it's Josh reguar from Android authority what's going on everybody and here is my unboxing and first impressions on the Samsung gear s2 and so here we are finally with the Samsung gear s2 we got a look at this at Aoife and LAN did a great job of showing just how unique this particular wearable is especially when you compare it to the Android wear iterations out there but Samsung is powering this using Tizen their OS that is exclusively currently for wearable devices here we are with the actual unboxing all right and there it is I have of course the dark gray as it is called version but you know just pretty much as black and pretty much grey all around really just dark colors there is a white version that is also available as well this is going to be a little bit more of a sporty SmartWatch as you can see already because of the silicon band and unlike the s2 classic you're not going to have the let's say little rivets that are on the rotating bezel right there so everything's going to be look looking pretty smooth on here so going to put that aside for now and get underneath in order to look at what we get with the box here is the charging dock right here now we have Samsung on the back right here but the watch should be able to just rest pretty easily like so and then the documentation and of course the plug adapter for the actual device and the charging port itself and actually tucked away into the side of the box finally is a set of replacement straps they have s-song up for small and the one that's on the watch right now is considered large so for those of you have smaller wrists they do have a strap there for you removing the actual strap from the watch is a little bit difficult at first until you realize that you have to sort of slide it out of the housing and then after that you can just snap the other one on now taking a look around the device that we already have the nice bezel right here which is going to prove to be a dial inside of the operating system here so it's one way of going through all of the elements rather than just having to swipe around the silicon ban will give it a little bit more resistance to splashes especially when compared to any leather straps but otherwise you have a stainless steel body on here which keeps things very nice so we're going to go ahead and get the plastic off of this bad boy right here now one of the best parts about this watch is that it comes with an AMOLED screen now that shouldn't come as much of a surprise given that this is a Samsung device but what that means is that the display will only turn on the pixels that it needs in order to display what is displayed and that should help with battery life which is something that we always have a caveat with when it comes to wearables so now with all of that done we can finally dawn the actual watch on the wrist and go through some of the functions so here we are with the Tizen OS I'm going to go ahead and just go in and out of a couple of areas right now my t-mobile bill is available already so that is a notification so if you go over to the left or if we wanted to swipe over we could always do that as well so swiping among all the different areas we're going to have a lot of options and applications so I'm going to use the bezel right here because it feels really nice and it's a new way of input for smartwatches that we think is the most exciting part of the gear s2 head over to the right we have a bunch of apps you can have a quick dial function right over here if we want to pick which buddy we want to have and there's a bunch of them that I can put right here and then you can always add a new widget here so here are a few of the widgets that you would be able to add you can add water and coffee consumption an actual schedule widget and there should be more inside of the gear manager which we will use for our full review and get a lot of new applications on here aside from the ones that are just already here and someone actually is already asking me if I have tested the s2 which of course today you are seeing the unboxing and first impressions of honestly the thing that we liked the most about the gear s2 thus far is this new version of input now we already took a look inside of the gear manager and there are quite a few applications there already a few of them we actually use like Yelp and stuff like that but we have yet to see if the ecosystem is as mature as it needs to be in order for Tizen to really stand up to Android wear now it's important to note that the gear s2 is compatible with a lot of different Android devices you don't need to have a Samsung device anymore exclusively in order to use the gear s2 however when you're going through the setup in this case I'm using my Moto X the brand new one you do have to install a number of extra applications in order to get it to work now before we finish up I do want to put out there real quick that I have a number of reviews that are coming out next week on smartwatches I have the Moto 360 second gen and the Huawei watch both of which will get the full review treatment and you can see those here on Android authority but with the gear s2 we're also going to go through a couple of comparisons not only between the Moto 360 and the Huawei watch but between Tizen on the gear s2 and Android we're using those two as examples so you can keep it tuned to Android authority for all of that and even more don't forget to check out all of the content from my colleagues in Android here and then you can download the android authority app up there in the corner to access not only our wonderful website and all of the content from there but also to listen to the android authority podcast discussing topics in android every single week keep it tuned here and subscribe to our 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