BARCELONA, SPAIN—While the Galaxy S5 was easily the most important thing announced at Samsung's Mobile World Congress press event, the company also showed off three new smart watches. Samsung demoed the Gear 2, the Gear 2 Neo, and the Gear Fit. The "Galaxy" branding is gone because the watches no longer run Android—they've switched to Samsung's Tizen OS.

The Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo are very similar. The main difference between the two is that the Gear 2 has a metal watch body and a camera, and the Gear 2 Neo is plastic with no camera. The no camera version is a great sign, as the camera on the Gear was widely panned. It looked awkward, it was awkward to use, and it was (understandably) a terrible camera. The Gear line relies on a smartphone, meaning you will always have a better camera (your smartphone's) with you. This makes the inclusion of any kind of camera on the watch kind of pointless.

Both devices are thinner than the original Galaxy Gear, and both have added hardware home buttons below the screen. The big improvement over the original Gear is that the camera and speaker have been moved from the strap to the watch body, so the watchband is now replaceable. It's not a normal watch band, but Samsung has announced watch bands in several colors, so your watch can match your outfit! (Or, you could get standard black.)











The other big improvement is the addition of a heart rate monitor to the inside of the watch body. The Gear can continually track your heartbeat while you wear it and send that information to a health-conscious smartphone app.

While the heart rate monitor and slimmer body are nice, we have a lot of the same complaints from our original Galaxy Gear review. The watch band is replaceable now, but it's still a rigid, rubbery plastic instead of a normal, flexible watch band. This makes the Gear "float" around your wrist, acting more like a huge bracelet than a watch. It adds a lot of awkwardness to the already-questionable aesthetics of a smart watch. The clasp on the original Galaxy Gear was huge, but it also housed a speaker. Now, it doesn't house anything, yet it remains a massive block that will be uncomfortable if you have your wrist resting on something.

Despite the OS switch from Android to Tizen, the software seems to be identical to the old Galaxy Gear. Samsung lets you have a background now, but the icons are all oddly drawn, single-color outlines. There still isn't all that much you can do with the Gear—you can't archive things from Gmail or reply to a Hangouts text. Compatibility remains limited to just Samsung devices, but at least there are a lot more Samsung devices on Android 4.3 and up now. It's been about six months since the launch of the original Galaxy Gear, and these products appropriately feel like a tiny, mid-cycle update.











The third smartwatch on display was the Samsung Gear Fit. This seems a little closer to a next-gen piece of hardware, with a curved AMOLED display. The device is in more of a Fitbit form factor than a watch though, reminiscent of a wide bracelet. The main screen of the Gear Fit displays one shortcut at a time on a colorful background, but the second you pick anything it switches to a three icon black and orange display. Some screens show three options without any icons, displaying only text. Just by casually using the software, you will run into three different interfaces on a device that maybe has ten different screens.

The Fit doesn't have any hardware buttons, instead offering a software back button on the left side of the display. The software and features are very similar to the watch-style Gear, doing things like a stopwatch and notifications in a slightly different form factor. We have a hard time imagining why three of these products exist or what Samsung expects these three devices' unique position to be in the tiny smart watch market.

A lot of the big ecosystem questions were left unanswered. Will the original Gear switch from Android to Tizen too, or will those users be left behind? Are all the apps that were developed for the Android Gear useless now? A new form factor like this needs a strong ecosystem, and pulling the rug out from under whatever ecosystem the original Gear had isn't a great sign of Samsung's prowess in this area. After switching from Tizen to Android, what happens when Google comes out with a smartwatch? If Google offers that software to third parties, does Samsung switch OSes again?

The biggest problem with all the Gears is the software, and over a six month period, we haven't seen Samsung touting any major software upgrades. Maybe now that the Tizen switch is complete, Samsung can start adding some more useful features. So far, our impression is that Samsung is still too much of a hardware manufacturer to go out on its own like this. While the heart rate monitor is nice, it is a hardware-driven feature from a hardware company. A fledgling form factor needs a hardcore software development team behind it that isn't afraid to rapidly iterate, but instead of rapidly iterating software, Samsung is rapidly iterating the hardware. Our major initial complaint about the Gear was that it wasn't very useful. After six months, the Gear line seems just as useful as it was at launch.