Gadgetory

fishing your enormous smartphone from your jeans every time it rings is way too much trouble what you need is a mini screen on your wrist to let you take calls and send texts with a minimum of physical exertion enter then the Samsung Galaxy gear the long-awaited SmartWatch from the people who brought you the galaxy s4 the gear is an android-powered watch that hooks up to your phone oh the bluetooth shows incoming calls which you can answer using the built-in microphone it shows texts to you that you can reply to you using something's s voice control software you can place a call or send a new text to just by telling the watch who to text then reading at the message scroll through the simple tiled interface and you'll find tools to control your media a pedometer to count your steps and the 1.9 megapixel camera housed on the strap to take extremely quick snaps third-party apps are available to download although they're extremely thin on the ground for now the most helpful a moment is the Evernote app that lets you save photos and voice messages to your Evernote account that will then sync across all your devices instantly it'll also let you read recent note on the watch which will come in very handy if you're following the shopping list it's a brilliant idea in theory but the gear does have a few problems chiefly it only currently works as the new Galaxy Note 3 as Samsung reckons it will be updated to it with the s4 and note 2 but if you're an on samsung android user don't get your hopes up secondly the notifications it can give are limited to calls and texts social networks messaging services like whatsapp or Google Hangouts and most importantly emails won't give you any notifications at all if more apps are written for the watch to bring these functions it will become considerably more useful physically it's quite a good-looking piece of kit it's much more compact than I imagined it would be and I found it very comfortable to wear it's available in a host of different colors too if you're particularly first about it matching your outfit the 1.6 3 inch screen is bright and sharp enough to make small text easily readable there's a bunch of what traders to choose from to or you can head to the dedicated app store to snag some fancy-looking third party ones it's a fun little device and those of you who've always wanted to talk into your watch like a Power Ranger will likely find it an exciting novelty by the time of shooting this video however it's really very expensive particularly for the limited number of functions it can actually perform as a concept the SmartWatch is certainly interesting but the galaxy gear it needs to make some key additions in order to be truly useful I'm Andrew coil for cnet and this is the Samsung Galaxy gear