Samsung Galaxy Gear 2 — It's alright, but not worth buying

Wearing it wasn’t winning me over

A Samsung Galaxy Gear 2 smartwatch sits on my desk. n the five days I’ve had it, I maybe wore it for a total of two hours..

There’s nothing wrong with the device; I just don’t find that wearing it improves my life. That is the fundamental problem with smartwatches—they simply aren’t useful enough.I prefer my old-school analogue-face dumb watch.

Don’t take my word for it. At the Guardian Charles Arthur reports Wearables: one-third of consumers abandoning devices. I’m not surprised.

This is a review smartwatch, it goes back to Samsung soon. If I had bought it from a shop I’d be wondering if I could get my money back.

Arthur writes:

That observation is strengthened by research from Endeavour Partners in the US, which found that one-third of American consumers who have owned a wearable product stopped using it within six months.

Better-looking and smoother—but still lacking

Before looking at what is wrong with these devices in general, let’s look at what Samsung got right with the Gear 2.

• It looks better than any other smartwatch including other Samsung models and Sony’s ugly effort. That’s important. Only the geekiest geek from geekville would be comfortable being seen in public with most 2014 smartwatches. Perhaps they will get better.
• The display is a nice-looking 320 x 320 Super-Amoled touch screen. It measures around 40mm diagonally or 1.63 inches.
• Samsung  boosted the processor from the earlier Gear watch. The Gear 2’s dual core power plant runs at 1 GHz. That figure alone is meaningless—it’s the smooth performance that really matters. You never feel you’re waiting for the processor.
• There’s 512MB of Ram and 4GB of storage.
• Samsung claims the battery will run for two to three days, longer with low use.
• A 2 megapixel camera with autofocus.
• The Gear 2 has IP67 certification which means it is dust and water-resistant.
• Samsung has swapped the software from a low-end version of Android to its own Tizen operating system.

Battery, display, camera—so-so specs

As smartwatches go, the Galaxy Gear 2 is the gold standard. Nobody does it better. In New Zealand the Galaxy Gear 2 sell for the thick end of $300. I’ve seen it on sale at $290.

The Galaxy Gear 2 only works with Samsung phones. That’s a strategy which suggests the company thinks it is a draw card, enticing customers into the Samsung world.

I’d suggest limiting its market in this way means it can’t possibly succeed.

At the Guardian Arthur says smartwatches have failed to ignite because the technology isn’t ready yet. He also says we’ve yet to see a killer app.

For me there’s a bigger problem. All the experience in recent years has shown there is an optimum size for a phone screen – that size is between 4.7 and five-inches. Smaller displays like the four-inch iPhone screen are useful, but bigger screens do a better job. The 40mm screen on the Galaxy Gear 2 simply isn’t big enough to do much more than just deliver a few basics.