Litabi
Nowadays every third person carries a smartphone in their pocket. But time has come where people are looking for smaller second screen to know what’s going on around with ease. In this way of progress Technology giant Samsung released The Samsung Galaxy Gear which is the latest development in the smartwatch scene.
A smartwatch is a device that serves as an extension of your smartphone and saves you the trouble of having to pull a phone out of your pocket to perform certain functions.
Compatibility
If you purchase a Galaxy Gear and don’t have a compatible device then it’s of no worth. It’s not going to do a single entity. Unfortunately one of the Gear’s most frustrating traits is that it supports only two devices which were launched alongside: the Note 3 and the new Note 10.1 but Samsung promises to add more devices to the list in the next month.
Hardware
Most of smartphones have fantastic specs but nothing is really with smartwatches. But when you pay $300 for it, you definitely want something. Samsung has done a decent job of meeting the criteria. Gear comes with a 1.63inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 320×320 pixels, sadly no HD quality. The watch face is constructed with stainless steel, whose contoured shape helps it wrap around the wrist. It holds a 1.9MP camera with an 800MHz Exynos processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, Bluetooth 4.0, two microphones, one speaker, and an insanely small 315mAh battery.
On the right edge there’s a power button for waking and putting the Gear to sleep. Underneath, you’ll see the charging connectors with a Samsung logo which becomes invisible when you’re wearing the Gear. The Gear comes with a micro-USB cord and a special charging cradle. The 277-ppi display can be seen even in daylight as Gear has an ‘outdoor’ brightness mode just for it.
Gear Manager
Once the Gear recognizes your phone, it starts downloading Gear Manager. Once everything finishes, the Gear Manager becomes your new best friend for the immediate future.
Gear Manager is very straight forward and it includes four main functions. The first is a ‘Clock’ that allows you to choose between nine different analog and digital clock faces for telling the time on Gear. It’s fairly attractive and simple.
The second is the ‘MY apps’ section that lists all the installed apps on Gear and provides setting for each. Next there’s ‘Find My Gear’ feature which tells your lost Gear to shout out so you can hunt it down.
Finally ‘Setting’ entry provides general settings for the Gear including Auto-lock. As soon you start walking away from your phone, the screen automatically locks with a PIN or pattern until you and Gear comes back in range. There’s also a smart-relay which lets you look at notification on the Gear and push that content back to your phone.
Camera
There is 1.9MP backside-illuminated camera. It can capture photos as well as 15-second-long 720p videos, which may be uploaded to your paired phone via Bluetooth, and is stored in a separate folder in the gallery so that it doesn’t get mixed with your phone’s images.
There are two images sizes to choose from- 1280×960 (4:3) and 1392×1392 (1:1). You can choose either normal focus or macro and there’s Sound and Shot, which saves an image along with background sound.
Performance and Battery Life
The 800MHz processor is more than sufficient to handle all kinds of tasks. The touch screen is much more responsive and there’s very little delay when opening apps. It’s slightly slower than phone but the difference is hardly evident.
The Gear features a 315mAh battery capable of holding charge for just one day of usage. The AMOLED display causes most of its drain, along with its always working sensors to notice movements of your wrist. If you want to use the Gear as your daily device, you will need to have it charger plugged in right next to your bed.
Conclusion
Galaxy Gear is like breath of fresh air in a world too obsessed with smartphone cores and screen pixels. It is a solid effort from Samsung which offers quite enough to make a name for it.
The Gear isn’t bad for a first generation product and it will get better as the ecosystem grows. We hope to see much more smartwatches in upcoming future with more compatibility and functionality.
