If you hesitated to call the Galaxy Gear a flop after all of the negative reviews, consumers have weighed in with their opinion of the device too, and it's not pretty: nearly a third of Galaxy Gear owners return the device.

Geek.com has obtained an internal memo from Best Buy and Samsung pegging the return rate at "above 30 percent." It sounds like the companies are somewhat puzzled by this, as the memo asks employees to help figure out why customers are so dissatisfied. Consumers are probably running into the same problems we found in our review: The Galaxy Gear requires a smartphone, but it's incompatible with most smartphones. It's supposed to relay notification information from apps, but it doesn't support the vast majority of apps, including apps made by Google, which are among the most popular on Android.

While several Samsung phones will eventually be updated to work with the Gear, Samsung only controls about 24 percent of the US market. Even if the Gear worked with every Samsung phone, it would still be incompatible with 76 percent of smartphones.

To be fair, the Gear demos extremely well. In the store (and at press events), Samsung has already set up all the clunky workarounds needed to get the Gear to do anything. When customers take the device home, they no doubt realize that the cool e-mail demo they got in the store requires them to ditch their current first-party push e-mail app and switch to Android's terrible POP3 client. It's the same story for other important functions like IM and social networks.

For the most part, wearables remain unnecessary luxuries. People will only be interested in them if they genuinely improve their lives and are easier and faster to use than a smartphone. The tolerance for a poor user experience goes way down when you have a device in your pocket that can do many of the same things. Until someone comes up with a successful template for a wearable device, expect more and more horror stories like this.