When the Galaxy Gear wristwatch launched last fall, the results looked like a Samsung panic move. Someone at the company must have thought there was a race to beat the other mobile-world titans—namely, Google and Apple—to a wearable, phone-like accessory for mass consumption, so they assembled a watch with some decent ideas and rushed it to market. Touchscreen, microphone, camera, pedometer, and more, all within wrist’s reach.

To this date, Google and Apple haven’t launched their own watches yet, but Samsung hasn't capitalized on that vacuum with its debut Gear. The watch wasn’t sloppy by any stretch, but it was slow, bulky, and limited enough to encounter the common consumer complaint: What do people need a “smart” watch for? Isn’t a phone enough?

Last week, Samsung used the Galaxy S5’s launch as an opportunity to refresh its smartwatch line. In brazen, damn-the-torpedoes fashion, the company has gone so far as to launch two distinct offerings: the $300 Gear 2, a direct refresh of last year’s model, and the $200 Gear Fit, a thinner, simpler option. One for each wrist, maybe? [Edit: We should also mention the Gear 2 Neo, which is nearly identical to the Gear 2 but removes the camera and sells for $200.]

The good news is, these second generation Samsung watches are on the right track. Comfort, usability, and even battery life pass muster on both the Gear 2 and the Gear Fit; there are at least a few reasons to own and use these watches, borne out by our experiences and tests. That means the issue at hand—er, wrist—is their place in the smartwatch pantheon, especially with at least Google edging ever closer to launching its own. Should you get a Gear, and has Samsung built an ecosystem, complete with sufficient software, worth strapping onto your wrist?

Residing in the Galaxy

For the uninitiated, Samsung’s smartwatches, like most others on the market, rely heavily on a smartphone for their functionality. Users are expected to leave their phones alone, maybe in their pockets, while the smaller-screen watch serves up the phone’s base-level content—e-mails, texts, voice-recognition, media controls—and offers a few unique perks to boot.

In the case of Samsung’s new watches, their attractiveness really begins and ends with device compatibility. If you don’t already own one of the 20 compatible Galaxy S phones, tablets, or other Samsung products, you’re outside of the Gear’s required ecosystem, as it won’t interface with other Android devices.

It’s an infuriating limitation, considering that these watches demand nothing more from their host phones than Bluetooth connectivity and Samsung’s own Gear Manager apps, but since the latter won’t be found on the Google Play Store any time soon, here we are.

I was already using a Galaxy S3 as my primary phone, so I booted both watches and synced them to their respective apps, which had to be downloaded from Samsung’s own “Apps” channel; for whatever reason, the Gear and Gear 2 share a manager app, while the Gear Fit requires a separate app, possibly because the latter watch doesn’t support additional, third-party apps (more on that later).

Our dreams of testing both watches simultaneously and looking like a goofball didn’t come to fruition, sadly, as Samsung only supports one watch per Samsung device. While it's nowhere near a typical-use scenario, if that sort of dual-wristing possibility matters to you, be warned.

A better-looking Gear

Look at the Gear 2 and its older brother side-by-side from a distance, and you’ll be forgiven for not spotting the differences. The main watch “body” retains a rounded-edge rectangle look, and they share the same screen—1.63” Super-AMOLED display at 320x320 resolution—flanked by a chrome finish and a metallic casing.

















Come in closer, and you’ll see the Gear 2 has nixed the odd-looking, front-facing screws in favor of a solid casing. Its front face is broken up solely by a home button, which now sits beneath the screen, as opposed to on the watch’s side. Thank goodness for that; you’ll want to hit that button on the regular, and now you actually can. The other substantial changes show up in the camera and wristband, which used to be a package deal. This time, the camera’s lens sits flush with the top of the body, as opposed to poking out of the wristband.

Not only does this look more sleek, it also emphasizes what is possibly the best part of the Gear 2’s wristband: it’s removable (and easily, at that). If you stick with the Gear 2’s default, plastic band, then its waffle-dot exterior, its ruffled interior, and the increased number of strap holes make it much more comfortable than the first Gear’s strap, but you’ll probably feel inclined to swap to a metal or leather option.

Specs at a glance: Samsung Gear 2 Screen 320x320 1.63-inch Super AMOLED OS Tizen SoC 1.0 GHz dual-core RAM 512MB Networking Bluetooth 4 Size 36.9 x 58.4 x 10.0mm Weight 68g Battery 300mAh Battery life 2-3 days between charges Compatible smartphones 20 Samsung Galaxy devices, including S3, S4, S5, Note 3, Note 2, Tab 4, TabPRO 10, and more Price $299

The new watch is only 5g lighter, dropping to 68g, but more noticeable is its body’s thinness, now down a full millimeter to 10 even. In all, the default watch-and-band combo felt, you know, like a watch. Noticeable but not obtrusive.

Syncing it up to my Galaxy S3 required downloading the Gear Manager app, updating it twice, and waiting for my phone and my Gear 2 to find each other via Bluetooth. This didn’t work at first in my case; I spent about 20 minutes waiting for a sync and checking options and refreshes before I hard-rebooted both devices. At that point, they made nice. The Galaxy S3 then pushed a software update to the Gear 2, and voilà, it worked.

By the way, without that initial handshake, the Gear 2 wouldn’t operate as even a dumbwatch; same with the Gear Fit. Fortunately, after initializing, they work as normal watches, even if you power your phone off or move outside its Bluetooth range. (For both watches, that range was mixed. Typically, I could walk more than 50 feet away from my Galaxy S3 in my home without any signal disruption, but if we parted at an odd angle, I’d lose signal in as few as 30 feet.)

Sunlight scrutiny

Once the Gear 2 is up and running, another giant difference emerges: color! The predominately white-text, black-background look of the first Gear is no more, and the home screen now supports custom wallpapers. It's a bright screen, by the way, even at the default 4/5 setting. While it's no eInk display à la the Pebble or the Qualcomm Toq, I was able to comfortably read my Gear 2's text on a cloudless, sunny day, so long as I took off my sunglasses and adjusted my watch's angle slightly.

Sadly, there's no automatic sensor to adjust for bursts of brightness; instead, users are expected to double-tap the screen with two fingers, which brings up a brightness menu. There, they can manually select "outdoor mode" if things get squinty, at which point the Gear 2 will maintain that brightness for 5 minutes before reverting to its default brightness. (The Gear Fit's equally bright screen offers the same option.) This is not an ideal workaround if, for example, a long jog takes you into a super sunny patch.

Just like last time, the home screen defaults to the date and time in giant font, along with three customizable app shortcuts, and it can be switched to display items like local weather, your next calendar event, or an animated watch face. (There’s no Mickey Mouse option like the 6th-gen iPod Nano, sadly.)

Swiping the Gear 2’s default screen brings up the watch’s apps, and they now appear four-at-a-time on the screen, as opposed to only one-per-screen like last time. For some reason, the default screen lacks the old watch’s swipe-up and swipe-down shortcuts to get to default apps like the dialer and camera; we hope that functionality comes back in a firmware update.

All of last year’s default apps return, and they’re largely the same. Surprisingly, they don’t work noticeably faster than last time around, in spite of the Gear 2 sporting a 1.0 GHz processor, which is 200 MHz faster than the Gear 1. The Gear 2 still contains 512MB of RAM. In particular, S Voice commands and the camera run at an identical pace. Using S Voice, I was able to send a brief text message to a friend, and that took 17 seconds on both watches, while the camera app’s load and shutter times were still fast enough for last-second snaps.









Since the camera has only improved from 1.9 to 2.0MP, such impulse shots are pretty much all it’s useful for, especially since its color range is still muted, and its video functionality is still limited to 15 seconds a clip. The only exception is if you want to freak people out with the camera app’s new voice functionality. When that’s enabled, phrases like “say cheese” will tell the watch to take a photo. (This only works when the camera app is active, and it triggers a very loud “click” noise, so don’t expect to stealthily capture any images.)

Notifications you can actually use

The most significant upgrade to the Gear 2, in terms of day-to-day use, is its improved notifications system. Last year, Ron lambasted the Galaxy Gear for how it teased users for most of its notifications.

Officially supported apps, like messaging and stock e-mail, would send a lot of information to your Gear in the event of a notification, including who sent it and some of its text. You could quickly glance at the notification and be on your way. But apps like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Hangouts, and Instagram, on the other hand, simply told users that, hey, something’s up. For more information, pull your phone out.







The Gear 2 handles its third-party notifications more like we’d hoped the first time around. Items like a Gmail message, a tweet, or an Instagram update will show the corresponding sender or username, along with a tiny snippet of text. (Importantly, you get to pick which apps' notifications your watch will carry, meaning you won't be bothered by, say, app update requests.)

Tap the screen at this point to load a pretty beefy summary. Users can read about 25 lines of text on the small screen before they’re asked to load the app on their phone (which can be done by tapping the watch at that point). If you don’t tap the notification when it first pops up, you’ll have to swipe to the notifications app to get back to it, as opposed to the info remaining the top-most content on your watch; I’d have liked to fix that annoyance with an option.

Sadly, third-party apps still don't enjoy reply functionality through the watch, but users can still at least respond to text messages with either a series of pre-written templates or spoken responses by way of S Voice. However, if you want to swap between templates and voice, you have to pick through a little options menu in the message itself. That's not the end of the world, but Samsung could have saved users a few steps if they wanted to go back and forth frequently.

Some of the returning Gear 1 functionality remains useful on a watch, particularly recording voice memos on a moment’s notice—which the Gear 2 converts into text, at that—but others vary. The Gear 2 works as a very clear Bluetooth speaker and microphone for phone calls, but you’ll have to keep the watch close to your face, which isn’t much more convenient (and certainly is dumber-looking) than pulling your phone out.

Of the new functions, two are unique to the Gear 2: the “WatchOn” remote, which works as an IR blaster for your TV set, and an internal music player. The latter lets you load MP3s onto your Gear 2’s internal memory of 4GB, which requires Samsung’s music phone app. As in, you dump songs onto your phone via USB, or the wireless Kies app, and then transfer those to the Gear 2. At that point, your watch will play that music on a Bluetooth headset.

I was able to make this work on a lark, but my phone’s audio collection is already tied to apps like Google Music and a podcast app, and my gym headphones aren’t Bluetooth. Thus, I stuck with the Gear 2’s default “media controller” app, which offered play/pause, back/forward and volume up/down buttons on my watch once I’d loaded a playlist on my phone.