...in a sea of blandness

You won’t be surprised to find that the Gear’s two best features are also its most readily accessible: a swipe down from the home screen gets you into the camera, a swipe up from the same spot brings up the phone dialer. A side swipe in either direction will get you into your apps carousel, where — unfortunately — things start to fall apart. The interface is based on a series of outline icons and textual sub-menus, which are relatively quick to navigate once you know what you’re doing, but terribly unintuitive — the same downward swipe that gets you into the camera from home acts as a back button everywhere else. Figuring these things out is a frustrating process of trial and error.

Then there’s the utterly infantile dependency the Gear has on its connected Galaxy device. Want to install a new app to the watch? You’ll need to sign in to your Samsung account and get it done via the Gear Manager app. Rearrange the order of apps? Same spot. Even changing the color of the default clock’s digits forces you to pick up your smartphone. Samsung promises a quick software update to make the Galaxy S4 work with the Gear, but for now you’re still only looking at the Note 3 and Note 10.1 as your compatible host devices.

And if you’re hoping for informative notifications, look elsewhere. The Gear will alert you to new Gmail and Twitter messages, but there’s no preview or even an accurate count of the unread missives. You’re just told there’s something requiring your attention and provided with an on-screen prompt that unlocks your phone and launches the Gmail app. That’s a nice trick, but it hardly absolves Samsung of responsibility for such a basic omission. Text messages can be read in full, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.

There’s a difference between ‘quick once you figure it out’ and intuitive

Having a robust selection of apps could still salvage the Gear’s fortunes, but alas, the software you can use on this device only extends the list of its deficiencies. The Pocket and Tweet QuickView apps I installed on the Gear failed to load most of the time, and when they did, they offered frightfully limited functionality.

Apps are limited in both quantity and quality

At about the 12th time of asking, Pocket did launch, starting up a text-to-speech audio readout of the article I’d wanted to read. That wasn’t exactly what I was looking for while sitting in a library foyer, so I shut the app down. Unfortunately, the playback of that sound seemed to introduce some sort of conflict in the Gear’s communication with the Galaxy Note, so I was no longer able to use the Gear as a remote control for music playback on the Note. Even when the remote media controls do work, you won’t be doing much with them: you can only adjust volume, play, pause, or toggle back and forth between tracks — and only with the default music app. There’s no playlist overview, no shuffle or repeat buttons; it’s about as much control as a 1992 Walkman would give you.

Line, Japan’s favorite mobile chat service, is among a number of big names that Samsung has assembled to provide extra apps for the Galaxy Gear. Its so-called app, however, only lets you receive messages and reply to them with stickers. That sort of liliputian utility is characteristic of the entire library of available software for the Gear, which is still mostly produced by Samsung itself. As with industrial design, software engineering isn’t among Samsung’s strengths, and the results on the Gear are a painful mix of unreliability and inadequacy.