This week I’ve been playing with the Samsung Gear S, the latest wearable from our favourite Korean chaebol. Almost uniquely, the watch can work without being paired to a smartphone, thanks to a built-in SIM card slot, WiFi and GPS. That means you can go for a run with just a watch on, and you’ll still be able to record your route, answer phone calls or texts on the go, and even listen to music from the built-in speaker. It’s a different class of device to most smartwatches we’ve seen before, and it’s honestly pretty cool. Here are my first impressions of the Gear S.
Design
The Gear S is giant. It’s like the phablet of smartwatches, with a big ol’ 2-inch (360 x 480) Super AMOLED display that curves around your wrist. That makes for a rather inelegant look, but the extra screen space really allows for the standalone watch features that set the Gear S apart.
Apart from the curved display, the design is quite standard for Samsung – there’s a metal ring around the display and a plastic band that clamps comfortably to your wrist. The clasp is adjustable, and should fit a good variety of wrist sizes.
The Gear S looks gigantic, but thanks to that curve it doesn’t jut out from your wrist too much – I had no issues getting the watch into my sleeves, for instance. The body measures 40 x 58 millimetres, with a 12.5 millimetre maximum thickness.
Hardware
Internally, the Gear S feels solid. There’s a dual-core 1GHz processor, half a gigabyte of RAM and 4GB of internal storage for apps and music. A 300mAh battery feels a little small, but battery life is still 1 or 2 days comfortably.
When it comes to sensors the Gear S is incredibly well-equipped: we have an accelerometer, gyro, compass, heart rate, ambient light, UV and barometer. Connectivity is also insane, with WiFi N, a-GPS, Bluetooth 4.1 and USB 2.0 via a special charging dock.
Software
The Gear S is the first watch I’ve used extensively to run Tizen, and I’m honestly pretty impressed so far. The interface is a little less intuitive than Google Wear, but there’s also a lot more going on here. A standard watch face lies at the centre of the interface, with notifications to the left and then up to five apps to the right (which could include a music player, an activity tracker, a news feed, a calendar and quick-toggle settings. Swiping from the top down brings you back, or opens your status bar if you’re already on the home screen. You can also pull up a list of apps to launch from the home screen, something that’s badly missing from default Android Wear.
Notifications are a little weird. You can easily read long previews of incoming emails and previews, but there seem to be no quick actions to these notifications – like archiving or replying to an email, for instance. To dismiss a notification, you have to long press and then tick the close box in the upper right, or drag down from the top and hit ‘clear all’. Dismissing a notification on your phone dismisses it on your watch, of course.
The standalone apps are the most fun things to play with on the Gear S. An Opera Mini app will allow you to surf the web (slowly), while an Engadget app will reel off an article to you at 250 words per minute using a system called Spritz. You can also straight up place calls, send text messages and write emails; thanks to a built-in microphone and speaker taking calls in any (relatively) quiet place is a cinch. Writing is a little more tricky, but it works surprisingly well… you can use a tiny tiny keyboard, or dictate using your voice.
There are a good range of apps available, particularly fitness ones, although finding them using the Galaxy Apps app is a bit hit-and-miss compared to the Play Store.
Conclusion
The Gear S surprised me. I expected a clunky, massive smartwatch that offered good features but was too impractical to use. Instead, I got a shapely smartwatch that won’t win any fashion awards but does provide some genuine benefits over a more traditional smartphone-dependent wearable. If you like the idea of a standalone smartwatch and you don’t mind paying for an extra SIM, then the Gear S is definitely worth a look. It’s available now from Mobile Fun.