You'll still need a Samsung Galaxy phone, running Android 4.3 or higher, to pair with the Gear 2īattery life is improved in the Gear 2, which we can probably chalk up to the battery-friendly Tizen OS.
But in 2014, when Spotify, Pandora, and similar streaming services are as big as ever? Not so much. A wrist iPod could have been a killer feature ten years ago. I suppose this could be useful for some people, but I stream most of my music these days, so this is a non-starter for anyone like me. You can then connect a Bluetooth headset and listen to MP3 tracks even if your phone isn't around. That feature is still on board with the Gear 2, but now it also lets you store music locally. The original Galaxy Gear let you control your smartphone's media output (play/pause, volume, and track skipping) from your watch. Isn't voice one of the most logical ways to interact with a wearable computer? If Samsung went to the trouble of updating its smartwatch only six months after the original, then why didn't it bother improving its voice assistant? Why not let S Voice compose emails, search the web, answer random trivia questions, or get sports scores? I find the lack of forward movement there baffling. Samsung's S Voice has a new look, but it isn't improved over the version found in the Galaxy Gear This could come in handy on a smartwatch, but it also illustrates just how barren that landscape is right now – when the closest thing to a must-have third-party app is a generic-looking calculator app. The most useful app I found was a calculator. None of the first Gear's third-party apps were anything worth writing home about, and the Gear 2's Tizen-friendly app library is continuing that trend. The Gear section of Samsung's app store is just as sparse as it was when the original Galaxy Gear launched. Advantage, Google.Īt launch, the Gear 2's app selection is supporting this line of thinking. And I imagine many an app developer will feel the same way. By comparison, the Gear 2 looks a little primitive. Now that I have the Gear 2 in hand (erm, on wrist), I can't help but compare it to the teaser Google gave us last month of its new Android Wear platform.
While Samsung was fumbling around, trying to figure out its smartwatch strategy, Google was privately moving in a much clearer direction. So much for those killer apps.īut there's one big problem. The result was that early adopters were left with an abysmal third-party app selection – even months after the watch hit store shelves. And Samsung's hands weren't picking very many. Instead, it only allowed a few hand-picked devs to create third-party apps for it.
So the company never opened up the Galaxy Gear's software to developers. What I didn't realize was that Samsung was already planning on ditching the Galaxy Gear's Android for its own Tizen OS. Well, I gave Samsung too much benefit of the doubt. With the opportunity to get a jump on Apple and Google in a new product category, why wouldn't Samsung do everything it could to improve the Galaxy Gear as quickly as possible?
Despite some obvious limitations at launch, I saw the hardware's potential, and figured the watch was only a firmware update and a few killer apps away from becoming the first breakthrough wearable. When we reviewed the original Galaxy Gear (pictured above, on the left), I was pretty enthusiastic about the almost universally-panned smartwatch. The Galaxy Gear (left) next to the Gear 2