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Galaxy Gear Review

2013-10-11
what's up everyone John retin different technobuffalo here 3 view of this guy it is the galaxy gear it is Samsung's first smartwatch and perhaps the SmartWatch that's going to lead the SmartWatch charge of the next few years I put it through its paces let me tell you what I think so as I do with all of my devices and give you a disclaimer I used it as my only watch for seven days which is the first time I really ever get to say that so this is one of the hardest devices I've really ever had to review I try really really hard to keep all bias out from any product I checked out but from the get-go I just really couldn't see the point of the galaxy gear on the outside looking in it's got a super low res 1.9 megapixel camera it really doesn't do anything that my phone doesn't but I gave it a shot mostly because I had to and as it turns out the more I wore it the more I started to see its utility which is really surprising it's for my mind it's kind of harder to change someone's mind than it is to reinforce already preconceived idea about a product so it's still far from perfect so let's go ahead and get started so for the hardware standpoint it's got a 1.6 inch screen an 800 megahertz single core processor but it's not a phone it's a watch and doesn't suffer at all from any lack of power in fact you almost want less power to maximize battery life everything on the you I felt really really zippy I actually really liked the way the watch looked the brushed aluminium and textured rubber band actually looked pretty nice and the camera getting out the side sir and made it look very high-tech surprisingly comfortable to wear at least as comfortable as any other watch might wear watch all the time it felt a little bit on the thick side better day or so I really didn't notice it mentioning that camera the shots on this camera are awful I don't mean just like bad I mean really really bad i'd say probably been worse than my first camera film from like a decade ago video predictably is equally as bad I really ended up only using the camera when I was showing someone what the watch could do and be like hey look it's got a camera and its really sure you take pictures with it on your wrists or have to hold it and you got to tilt your head up and look and then finally take your picture it just didn't make sense me it didn't look good it's a bad view finder it's a bad the gear has an outdoor mode which turns up the brightness but doesn't like to see the screen at all in the daylight or with polarized lenses on at all I might as well just be black so if you want to use in the daylight you work in direct sunlight you'd have a really really hard time with it the more you keep it in that outdoor mode the less your battery going to be which we will definitely talk about so let's jump over to software this is where we get down to the functionality of the watch that from getting the UI is actually pretty simple you swipe left and right to get to your apps and your settings and all that kind of stuff and from there it's just tapping and scrolling what you want to use a modern smartphone it's actually pretty intuitive let's go to your watch screen you just swipe down from anywhere it's almost like pulling down the Android of occasions tray you're supposed to be able to turn the screen on by lifting your wrists sort of doing like at this motion it only worked about sixty percent of the time times you really have to like exaggerated it like this to get it to turn on mostly I just push the button on the side to get it to turn on and we get to that watch screen you can customize it which is actually pretty nice for mine I had the time and at three shortcuts made it very easy I'd have to go into the settings or the apps all that often everything I needed was right on that home screen their apps for most things including a pedometer notifications and more can be downloaded I liked that it gave me notifications for text messages it was actually really really handy and let me read them but why didn't it do that for male so I give an example of how I start to find the utility here with the galaxy gear so I just had a newborn baby and it was about four in the morning I was trying to rock him to sleep in his rocker had my phone in my pocket and had the galaxy gear on I got a text message from a friend on the East Coast and I couldn't turn my phone on to look at it because the light would have woken up the kid if you ever had a child do not want to wake a sleeping baby could be hours before they go back to bed so i was able just to check the message right on my phone the light didn't wake him up and it was really easy in a sort of at that point start to see okay I can actually get why you might use this it does rely on s voice for voice commands not the google search which is really a shame so it's really a crap sure it's actually going to work as voice i am not a fan of at all and it doesn't really work all that well here on the watch so back to camera you can only view the pictures you've taken not those on your device so it's kind of annoying pinch-to-zoom though it works pretty well on those and it'll sink the pictures automatically from the gear over to your Galaxy Note 3 which it only works with right now it does not work with any other device only the Galaxy Note 3 which is kind of silly Samsung's guts to nap call the gear manager lets you customize your device and download tons more applications so many of my gripes should have got could get a dress by applications and there are as I use the device every day it seems to be more apps are available so much like a phone it also makes phone calls essentially just a Bluetooth speaker on your wrist you had a speaker right down there there's a microphone built-in so as I mentioned they started to find the watch more useful and again somehow involves a baby so I was holding the baby in one hand I had my phone on the couch and I was trying to rock him to get him to quiet down and my mom culture is coming over with dinner which is super appreciated and I couldn't have made it over to get the phone and answer it while sitting the baby was able just answer the phone right for my wrist talk to her have her come over bring us a delicious fish dinner coincidentally and so is then I thought okay no one's around so I don't feel silly going like this the quality of the speaker wasn't overly awesome but I definitely able to use it and it was really really helpful to have and I wouldn't have realized that if I didn't use it for as long as I did so a big question mark from you is how is battery life going to be on this and it lasted pretty solid two days in this frenzied from 7am to 7pm I turned it off at night which was not awful you can charge it's from every day and be fine speaking of charging it is a gigantic pain in the butt you need an adapter to do so you don't have a micro USB port on here you got to plug it into this pre clunky adapter and then you can charge it so the galaxy gear for me feels very very much like a public beta sort of like Google glass does a finished product I do now totally see the utility behind it but if 399 only working on one device I could never ever ever in a million years justify the price for this it was useful for those few times I was holding a baby or rocky baby to sleep but doesn't do anything that my phone doesn't so me Baker's carry my phone with me in my pocket or maybe trying to brighten is down I'm trying to rock the baby to sleep and then the galaxy gear maybe not so much right now a few glaring omissions I be able to read emails on it makes very little sense of relying on s voice makes even less sense to me the speaker quality is mediocre it looks cool it functions pretty well it's relatively comfortable but there are a lot of holes in need to be addressed if you're thinking about getting the galaxy gear I'm best bet is to wait for Jen to this gets a six on the TechnoBuffalo a scale which is a much improved or what I thought was gonna get initially it's got utility but it's very far from a polished product so when you guys think of our first SmartWatch review do you like the Galaxy gear is it for you not for you I would love to hear your thoughts are you picking up the combo of the note 3 in the gear leave in the comments down below and let us know what your opinions are till next time I am John render from technobuffalo be sure to check us out at technion Buffalo com fat ladies and greatest tech news and i'll see you guys in the next video bye bye what's up everyone it's ashley thanks so much for watching that most recent video if you enjoyed it please click on the word subscribe right underneath me to get tons of more tech videos from us here at TechnoBuffalo we've got unboxings comparisons reviews recaps and everything else you can think of here on the channel if you're in the mood for more technology just click right over here to check out some of our most recent 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