Samsung Gear Sport review: middle of the road. Samsung gear sport

Samsung Gear Sport review: middle of the road

The Samsung Gear Sport brings a similar experience to the Gear S3 with more of an emphasis on fitness. Should you buy it? Here’s our full Samsung Gear Sport review!

Think smartwatch and, chances are, Samsung Gear comes to mind. Running the company’s custom Tizen OS rather than Android Wear, Samsung’s Gear range has had many additions over the past few years. From fitness devices to feature-rich smartwatches and everything in between, Samsung’s approach to wearables is that there’s something for everyone.

Earlier this year, the company unveiled the Gear Sport and the Gear Fit 2 Pro. While the latter is a fitness-focused wearable, the former is designed to fill the gap between the Gear Fit 2 Pro (at the lower end), and the company’s flagship wearable, the Gear S3 Classic and Gear S3 Frontier.

With new partnerships and a feature set that combines most of the features of the Gear S3 with a few of its own, should the Gear S3 be your new smartwatch? Is a fitness-first approach right for a smartwatch? Let’s find out – this is our Gear Sport review.

Design

The design of Samsung’s Gear smartwatch range hasn’t changed much since the Gear S2 and that continues to be true with the Gear Sport. The watch brings a lot of the design cues of the Gear S3 to a lower price point. It looks good on the wrist and, crucially, it’s smaller than the Gear S3 which should mean it’ll fit more wrists.

Like the Gear S3, the signature rotating bezel has grooves that provide subtle tactile feedback. This time, though, there are no indentations to signify seconds on the clock. Instead, the bezel is free of any markings which provides a subtler and more understated experience.

The bezel is my favorite feature on the Gear Sport and it provides what is arguably the best way to navigate any smartwatch on the market. A little tug or a little push is all that’s needed to make it move, and it feels a little easier to use than the Gear S3’s bezel, which seems to be slightly firmer. While you can use the touchscreen, the rotating bezel provides a simple way to navigate the Tizen experience.

One of the biggest complaints with the Gear S3 was its large 46mm casing and Samsung is aiming to make the Gear Sport compatible with more wrists. The body casing is noticeably smaller at 42.9mm. It may still be a little large for some people, but should fit most wrists comfortably.

The Gear Sport comes with a silicon Band in the box (either Black or Blue, depending on which color Gear Sport you buy) but there’s plenty of other bands available as well. As we saw back at the Gear Sport launch last month, there’s 10 different designs of Nato bands, and there’s also a hybrid strap that combines rubber at the bottom with leather on top for those who want a more stylish experience. The Gear Sport also supports any 20mm watch Band, which allows you to change the Band out and make it truly yours.

The rest of the Gear Sport follows the design we’ve come to expect from Samsung with a back and home key on the left and a heart rate monitor under the watch face. During my testing, a key thing I found is that you’ll want to pick the right loop when clasping the watch as too loose and the Gear Sport has a habit of rotating around your wrist rather quickly.

Unlike the Gear S3 Frontier or Gear S3 Classic which have the ability to work with multiple outfits, the Gear Sport is firmly designed for fitness fanatics. The sporty nature (and name) of this watch means it’s designed with a fitness-first approach, but it looks good most of the time. The Gear Sport should work with most outfits, though if you’re wearing business dress you might want to pick something else.

Hardware

Unlike its Gear S3 sibling, the Gear Sport is designed to be a fitness companion on your wrist. While it possesses many of the features that make the Gear S3 a smartwatch, Samsung has removed a few to make the Gear Sport a more affordable watch.

The features removed don’t deter from the experience of the Gear Sport much. For example, the Gear Sport comes with Samsung Pay but only via NFC-enabled terminals. The Gear S3 and Samsung’s smartphones also come with MST technology, which allows you to use contactless payments even at terminals that don’t support NFC.

The Gear Sport is the first Samsung smartwatch to come with 5ATM support, allowing you to swim up to 50 meters underwater

The Gear S3 is rated at IP67 for dust and water resistance up to 1 meter for up to 30 minutes. The Gear Sport comes with 5 ATM support instead, which allows you to swim up to 50 meters underwater. It’s with this that the Gear Sport takes fitness much more seriously than the Gear S3.

Other hardware features include a 1.2” 360 x 360 pixels Super AMOLED display with Gorilla Glass 3 support that’s even bright outdoors in direct sunlight. There’s also 4 GB of internal storage, a dual core 1 GHz processor and 768 MB of RAM which provides a snappy experience. An array of sensors and connectivity options also make it onboard, including Bluetooth 4.2, Wi-Fi, NFC, a Barometer, Heart Rate Monitor, and ambient light monitor to automatically adjust the display brightness based on the conditions.

We found that while the display is great at all brightness levels, keeping it at level 4 brightness or lower significantly helps the battery life. At levels 3 or lower however, it can be quite hard to see in bright sunlight so you’ll want to tweak it based on your conditions. I preferred to manually control the brightness rather than use the ambient light sensor as this helps ensure you can maximize the battery life.

The Gear Sport is powered by a 300 mAh battery that lasts between two and three days on average. During ten days with the Gear Sport, the battery was never a concern, but we found it to last around two days when you’re using all of the features. Overnight, you’ll find the Gear Sport drains around 8 to 15%, although if you enable the power saving mode and turn on Do Not Disturb, this can be as low as 5% in a whole night.

From empty, the Gear Sport takes around 2.5 to 3 hours to charge when using the included charging dock which uses USB-C, but beware: if you use the charger from the Gear S3 (which uses microUSB), it takes noticeably longer to charge the Gear Sport so we’d recommend using the charger that comes with the Gear Sport.

Some Gear S3 features make their way to the Gear Sport, one of which is GPS, which allows you to see a live map of your route, as well as the route you took after the run. Combined with the new calorie counter feature – more on that below – this is great for those who take fitness seriously.

A fitness-first experience

The Gear Sport is definitely a worthy contender if you’re serious about your fitness. Like the Apple Watch, it brings several watch faces designed to show your workout and fitness stats at a glance. Automatic workout tracking also makes it easy to keep track of your fitness goals and the addition of a partnership with Speedo for swim tracking is perfect for tracking laps in the pool.

Part of the Tizen experience is based around the different home screens, each of which are occupied by a widget. A turn of the bezel to the left of the home screen pulls up different screens for each notification but it’s when you turn to the right that you see the full dedication to fitness in Tizen.

Out of the box, there are several widgets dedicated to showing your fitness stats. From the calories burned counter – with a helpful reminder of yesterday’s calories so you can compare – to your step counter, floor counter and average heart rate, there are several ways to check your stats at a glance.

One widget that is particularly useful is the workout screen which allows you to activate trackers for running, walking, cycling and swimming with just a couple of taps. The automatic workout tracker is definitely useful but we found that it can mistake brisk walking for a run. This widget makes it simple to ensure you’re accurately tracking your various exercise routines.

There’s also plenty of other widgets available, like a screen dedicated to showing your Samsung Health info (exercise, steps and sleep), a counter to show you how many cups of water you’ve consumed and various others around challenges, a leaderboard – where you can compare your weekly step count with your friends – and particularly useful for coffee lovers, a caffeine counter.

Of course, there are other non-fitness related widgets like App shortcuts, calendar, contacts, news briefings, an alarm, and a world clock. There are a few others available to download via Gear Apps but I found no need for these as the preinstalled widgets offer the functionality that I personally want to use.

Samsung has updated its Health app to offer you personalized fitness advice. After setting up your profile in Samsung Health, you’re able to pick from a variety of fitness programs that are tailored specifically to you. Once you pick your fitness program, you can either watch them on your phone or on your home TV.

Partnerships

Samsung partnered with a few companies in launching the Gear Sport.

The first of these is Under Armor, which launched an exclusive set of apps on the Gear Sport. As mentioned earlier, the live mapping of your run is through the Map My Run feature, which is now exclusive to Gear Sport. It’s unclear whether this will launch with other Gear devices via an update, but Samsung has said it’s under consideration.

The biggest partnership – for me at least – is Spotify. The Gear Sport is the first device to come with full offline capability for Spotify free and Premium users. This is my number one music streaming service and on the Gear Sport it’s great to have the ability to store around 400-500 tracks on the 4GB of internal memory.

I found it works rather well and while it takes a little bit of time to download to the Gear Sport, it’s incredibly useful for those times when you don’t want to take your phone with you. There’s also a collection of Spotify Run workout playlist. While I have very specific tastes in music, I found that these playlists are great to increase the tempo and get your heart rate pumping.

I’m not personally a swimmer so I’ve not really been able to try out the watch’s final partnership, with Speedo. This is Speedo’s first wearable partnership and while I’m yet to try out the feature, Samsung says it can track your laps in the pool, the distance, and the time of each lap. After each swim, the app supposedly produces a report on your swim workout. We’ll put this to the test in the near future and update with our findings.

Gear Sport – should you buy it?

Android-compatible smartwatches have undergone several changes in the few short years they’ve been available to purchase. Initially billed as a way to stop looking at your phone screen unnecessarily, they quickly became a method to track fitness. Samsung’s own internal research shows that 92% of active smartwatch owners use their watch primarily for fitness and this shows in the approach to the Gear Sport.

Designed to affordably bring the fitness benefits of the Gear ecosystem to a larger audience in mind, the Gear Sport mostly delivers on its goal. Rather than make a smartwatch with some fitness tendencies, Samsung opted to make a fitness device that fits sleekly on your wrist and offers the main smartwatch features that people use (fitness, communication, news and entertainment, and utilities).

As someone who’s getting back into fitness, I found the Gear Sport useful to keep track of my fitness goals

As someone who’s getting back into fitness, I found the Gear Sport useful to keep track of my goals. The subtle prompts around my progress coupled with at-a-glance reporting of where I am with my day’s fitness goals provides a welcome companion to keep me on track.

Should you buy the Gear Sport? If you’re interested in a device that offers a fully-fledged smartwatch experience with an emphasis on fitness, then the Gear Sport certainly delivers. If you’re more interested in a smartwatch that fits every outfit you’re wearing and also has fitness options, then the Gear S3 might be a better pick.

What do you think of the Gear Sport and do you plan to buy one? Do you use a smartwatch and if so, which one? Let us know your views in the Комментарии и мнения владельцев below!

Samsung Gear Sport smartwatch is a brilliant balance between form and function

Samsung’s Gear Sport is the best Android smartwatch, and strangely enough, it doesn’t run Android Wear. Smartwatches need to tug at our heartstrings, and in our Samsung Gear Sport review, we found ourselves wanting to grab the watch to wear whenever heading out. While the Gear Sport isn’t the most attractive Android smartwatch — that is reserved for the Movado Connect — it still looks great, it’s slim, and most of all, the rotating bezel makes it fun to use.

We still think the Apple Watch Series 3 is the best smartwatch you can buy, but Android device owners can’t use it. The Gear Sport is a close second, but it’s the best option if you’re on Android.

Slim, stylish and comfortable

Earlier this year, Samsung released the LTE-connected Gear S3 smartwatch. It’s big, bold, and bulky. Put the new Gear Sport next to it, and it’s easy to notice the differences. The Sport is slimmer, and has a smaller 1.2-inch AMOLED screen, though with the same 360 x 360 pixel resolution. The rotating bezel is a little more subtle with smaller ridges, and despite the screen being fully circular, the 42.9mm case isn’t — it’s a tad squarer than round.

It’s the best way of interacting with a smartwatch operating system. Rotate it to the right to see widgets, and rotate it to the left to see your notifications. You can even use it to scroll through walls of text. Since you won’t need to touch the screen as often, it helps prevent smudges and your finger isn’t blocking the small screen.

The rotating bezel is a big reason why we like the watch. Samsung said the tactile sensation and clicking sound have been improved, and it’s noticeable. It’s satisfying to turn and hear the clicks, and best of all it works without a hitch. It does, however, feel a little loose from the case because if you tap the bezel, it clinks with the metal, and it can be a little loud.

Solid performance, and a well-designed Tizen operating system

The Gear Sport isn’t as fast as the Apple Watch Series 3, but it’s speedier than any Android Wear smartwatch on the market. It shares the same specs as the Gear S3: A 1GHz dual-core processor with 768MB of RAM, and 4GB of internal storage. Scrolling through the interface and apps is fluid and smooth, and we generally haven’t seen any problems with performance.

Samsung’s proprietary operating system, Tizen, powers the Gear Sport, and the interface is simple to use. If you’re worried how well another OS works with Android, fret not: You’re able to respond to or interact with every notification that comes through. It’s easy to delete notifications; just swipe them up and they immediately disappear from the phone. Tap on a notification, and you can read it in its entirety and act on it. You can use your voice to reply to a message, scribble or type on a keyboard, quickly tap some canned responses, or send emojis.

While the Gear Sport is compatible with iOS, you can’t respond to many notifications, and overall you’re a lot more limited in what you can do. This is the case with Android Wear on iOS too, so if you have an iPhone you’re better off going with the Apple Watch.

The Gear Sport can automatically detect your workout after 10 minutes.

The 4GB of storage lets you add music to the watch so you can play it via Bluetooth-connected headphones or earbuds, if you don’t have your phone near you. The pairing process is quick, and switching between music from the phone and music on the watch is quick. For Google Play Music, which is the default music player on Samsung phones, transferring music to the watch is a little tricky without a computer. Samsung’s Gear app isn’t able to identify downloaded songs from Google Play Music, so we had to use a third-party app called Music Mate to get it all to work. After that, it was easy to add songs to the watch via the Gear app. If you’re on Spotify, you won’t have much of a problem as the Spotify Tizen app easily lets you add your downloaded playlists to the watch — the Apple Watch can’t do this.

Our main gripe, and this extends to Android Wear, is the lack of app support. Ordering an Uber is neat and all, but we would much rather have the ability to initiate conversations without having to wait for a message. There’s no Messenger, Allo, Hangouts, or WhatsApp, which means you can only send an SMS to your contacts (with the phone tethered). On the Apple Watch, you can open Messenger and start a conversation with someone from the watch itself.

Two of the main differences between the Gear Sport and the Gear S3, other than size, are the lack of LTE and Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST). The former means you will need your phone with you to get notifications on the Gear Sport. There’s still GPS, which you can use to track your runs via various fitness apps in the Galaxy Apps store.

MST is the technology Samsung uses to power Samsung Pay. It allows you to use a Samsung phone or the Gear S3 to make contactless payments wherever credit or debit cards are accepted. It’s a step ahead of near field communication (NFC), which is the technology Apple and Google use with Apple Pay and Android Pay. On the Gear Sport, Samsung has opted for an NFC version of Samsung Pay, instead of MST, making the watch’s payment capabilities the same as its competitors. It allowed the company to make the watch a little smaller, but the tradeoff is you can only use Samsung Pay retailers that support NFC.

There’s more the Gear Sport can do: It can control PowerPoint presentations, and can act as a controller for the Samsung Gear VR virtual reality headset. Best of all, you can use it to manage your Smart home devices via Samsung Connect, like with HomeKit on the Apple Watch. This is an area where Android Wear struggles despite having Google Assistant onboard.

Samsung’s watch also has an assistant, but it’s not the company’s Bixby platform — it’s the rather basic and slow S Voice. Double-tap the home button and you can inquire about the weather, place calls, or send a text. It’s terrible at search queries, and we’d much prefer Bixby over it. Samsung said it’s focusing on Bixby with its smartphones first.

Fitness and heart rate

Samsung’s approach to fitness on the Gear Sport revolves around the Samsung Health app. On the watch, it can track your calories, your steps, distance traveled, stairs climbed, and more. You can also add a widget to now add how many calories you eat, so that it can automatically deduct it from the number of calories burned. The problem is knowing how many calories are in what you’re eating — you typically need a smartphone to look it up.

The Gear Sport can automatically detect your workout after 10 minutes, where it will constantly monitor your heart rate. It’s accurate, but the workout can go on for a few minutes longer than after you actually stop. Automatic detection works with walking, running, cycling, elliptical training, rowing machines, and a dynamic workout mode covers other activities. You can also manually start some of these sessions, including swimming (the watch is water resistant up to 50 meters, and can even work in salt water).

The GPS on-board lets you map your runs for accurate distance measurements, and the heart rate monitor can also measure your beats per minute whenever you ask it. We found it to be fairly precise: It measured 89 beats per minute, and we manually calculated 85 bpm.

All of this works with a myriad of Under Armour apps that don’t come pre-installed, but Samsung is pushing them heavily. You can choose from Endomondo, MapMyRun, and MyFitnessPal on the Galaxy Apps store. We should note — we installed MyFitnessPal, and it did not load for us. Strava, one of the biggest fitness apps, is also not available on the Gear Sport.

Great battery life

With the always-on screen and GPS toggled off, we returned home around 6:30 p.m. with 75 percent remaining. Our usage largely involved interacting with notifications. We didn’t put the watch on the charger overnight, and it ended up dying around 3 p.m. the next day. You can definitely stretch the Gear Sport’s 300mAh battery longer.

If you leave GPS and the screen on, you’ll unsurprisingly see a hit on battery life. By 7 p.m., the watch was at 47 percent. After a day with the same settings, a 30-minute workout session, and some music streaming, the watch ended with around 35 percent by 7 p.m.

The Gear Sport’s charger is a dock — just plop the watch on it and it’ll charge up relatively quickly. It hit 100 percent from zero in about an hour and a half.

Price, availability, and warranty

The Gear Sport costs 300, and it’s available from Samsung’s website, Amazon, Best Buy, Macy’s, and U.S. Cellular.

Samsung offers a standard limited warranty that protects your device from manufacturing defects up to one year from purchase.

Our Take

The Samsung Gear Sport is great for people who want a feature-rich smartwatch that’s slim, lightweight, and comfortable.

Is there a better alternative?

Yes. One of the closest competitors is a Samsung product — the Gear S3. It’s bulkier and bigger than the Gear Sport, but it has an LTE connection and contains MST technology that lets you use Samsung Pay in far more locations than the competition. It costs a little more at 350.

For Android device owners, take a look at the Huawei Watch 2. There’s no LTE model in the U.S., but it essentially offers the same features as the Gear Sport in a small package. It can be found for lower than 300.

For iOS owners, your experience with Samsung’s Gear smartwatches won’t be as satisfying as using Apple’s option, the Apple Watch Series 3. With a similar price, an optional LTE connection, a small size, and excellent build quality, there’s no better choice.

How long will it last?

The Gear Sport can survive up to 50 meters under water, including salt water, and its metal build should keep the glass protected without issue. Expect the watch to last for two to three years, as you likely won’t get software updates after the second year.

Should you buy it?

Yes. If you’re looking for a stylish smartwatch without an LTE connection, the Gear Sport is your best bet.

Editors’ Recommendations

Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…

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Samsung Gear Sport smartwatch Review

Samsung may be best known for its Galaxy smartphones, but its smartwatches are no less worthy of attention. Whether you’re an active individual in need of a fitness companion or a tech-savvy person who finds classic watches lacking in function, chances are the company’s Gear lineup has something that just might suit you. Something like the Samsung Gear Sport, for instance. It is the latest member in the series, and I spent a couple of weeks in its company to find out whether it is worth the 300 asking price. Let’s dive in.

• Samsung Gear Sport smartwatch
• Charging cradle
• Wall charger with microUSB connector
• Small and large wristband
• Quick start guide

Gear sport review 2020 update

Design

The Samsung Gear Sport shares a lot of design DNA with the Gear S3 and the Gear S2. Said briefly, it is a stylish piece of kit. The black version you see here is minimalist in nature and doesn’t draw attention, but there’s also a flashier blue model designed to stand out.

Built of metal and glass, with a plastic bottom, the watch is big enough to be comfortable to use and to accommodate a reasonably sized battery, but lacks the chunkiness and the rugged appearance of the Gear S3 Frontier. And I’d say it suits me well, whether I’m exercising in my sporty jacket or just going about my day in my office-friendly shirt. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend the Gear Sport to ladies – it is simply too big to look good on a woman’s wrist.

Out of the box, the Gear Sport comes with a stretchy rubber strap that is comfy and grippy, held by a classic and reliable metal clasp at the end. The strap is removable, and a traditional 20mm Band can fit in its place. You might end up replacing yours sooner or later because the stock one on mine is already showing signs of wear around the edges.

The circular bezel around the display is as effective as usual: it is used to browse through the interface, and each twist is accompanied by a nice, easy-to-feel click. On the side are two buttons – one that takes you back a step and one that takes you back to your watchface.

Water resistance is present on the Gear Sport. In fact, the gizmo is resistant down to 50 meters and can be worn during swimming exercises. Even salt water shouldn’t do it any harm, although rinsing it with fresh water after going for a dip in the ocean is pretty much mandatory.

Display

The Samsung Gear Sport comes with a 1.2-inch circular AMOLED touchscreen display – larger than the one on a 38mm Apple Watch, yet a tad smaller than the one on a Gear S3 Frontier. It has a resolution of 360 by 360 pixels and is protected by Gorilla Glass 3 scratch-resistant glass.

Technicalities aside, the screen on the Gear Sport is pretty great. It is bright enough to be perfectly legible on a sunny day, but it won’t burn your retinas at night since it gets dimmer automatically when appropriate. Colors are vivid, graphics are sharp, and text is easy to read, and there’s the neat, full-color Always-on Display option, letting you leave the display lit at all times.

Unsurprisingly, touch sensitivity suffers when the screen is wet, but it can tolerate sweaty fingers in most cases. The rotating bezel and side buttons ease navigation in such circumstances, and a Water Lock mode is available to disable touchscreen input entirely during swimming exercises.

Samsung Gear Sport (COMPLETE WALKTHROUGH)

Interface and functionality

Throughout my testing, I used the Samsung Gear Sport together with a Galaxy Note 8. Pairing was simple and effortless: as soon as I powered the smartwatch, the phone automatically detected its presence, and a tap later the process was underway. The Gear Sport is also compatible with non-Samsung Android devices, as well as with newer iPhones, though as expected, you’ll have the smoothest experience if you’re a Galaxy user.

Overall, using the Gear Sport is a fun and smooth experience. The watch is fast and responsive, just like the Gear S2 and S3 before it, while the Tizen 3.0 is designed from the ground up to work seamlessly with the circular display and rotating bezel. No common action feels like it is requiring too many steps to perform.

As far as navigation and layout go, the software on the Gear Sport isn’t much different than what you’d find on a Gear S3 or a Gear S2. The watch wakes up automatically when you look at it, displaying the watchface of your choice. Admittedly, this gesture is not guaranteed to work every time, but failures are rare. Then you use the bezel to access widgets or your pending notifications. Swiping down displays a screen with status information and quick toggles for various settings.

Something that is new is the added support for Spotify listening plus the option to store tracks offline – on the watch itself. Basically, this allows you to leave your phone behind and pair a Bluetooth headset directly to the Gear Sport whenever you want to listen to music while exercising. So that’s what we did, and it worked like a charm, with no connection interruptions occurring during our testing. The 40 songs that I saved took up roughly 150MB, meaning that around 500 tracks could fit on the watch’s internal memory (4GB total, ~2GB user-available).

Alas, the Gear Sport is not without its imperfections. For instance, vibration feedback could have been more pronounced. It was more than once when I didn’t feel the watch pulse after receiving a notification. Voice commands still feel slow, and on several occasions answers didn’t arrive at all. The selection of apps has been growing, but still feels limited compared to what the Apple Watch and Android Wear have to offer. None of these flaws are dealbreakers, we’d say, but there’s definitely room for improvement.

Activity tracking

If there’s one thing a smartwatch with the word “Sport” in its name should excel in, that would be activity and exercise tracking. In this respect, the Samsung Gear Sport holds plenty of potential, equipped with a range of sensors, such as a heart rate monitor, an alitmeter and barometer, and a GPS radio for location tracking. Plus, the 5ATM water resistance makes it perfectly safe for tracking of swimming exercises.

By default, the Gear Sport is set to track activity automatically, so when it detects that you’ve been walking intensely for some time, this will be recorded and stored as exercise. But of course, you can start a workout manually by choosing an exercise preset: running, cycling, swimming, crunches, jumping jacks, to name a few. In these situations, the Gear Sport performs well, presenting a detailed log of your exercise once you’re done.

But ironically, the watch isn’t great at tracking sports like soccer or football, presumably because there aren’t presets for those. Using the “Running” preset instead returns wildly inaccurate data while picking the “Other Workout” preset or letting the watch automatically detect the exercise logs very little information.

Connectivity

While the Samsung Gear Sport connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth, it also has its own Wi-Fi radio, and if it gets outside of your phone’s range, it will attempt connecting to a Wi-Fi network so that you still get your notifications. It is cool how Wi-Fi network passwords stored on my Note 8 were automatically copied on the smartwatch as well.

Samsung Pay is enabled on the wearable, but while it works on contactless payment terminals, there’s no support for ones using the old-school magnetic strip technology.

There’s no LTE or any other cellular connectivity support on the Gear Sport. Since there’s no speakerphone on it, you can’t use it to make or take phone calls, although you have the option to pick up or to reject an incoming one.

Battery Life

As the case is with most gadgets, the battery life of the Samsung Gear Sport depends greatly on how it is used. By default, the always-on display mode is disabled, and the screen brightness is set to a perfectly adequate 7 out of 10 – a configuration that easily got me through 3 full days of use, but without using GPS services and without listening to any music through it. With mixed use, a 2-day battery life is to be expected.

To put these results into context, the Apple Watch Series 3 and the Android Wear-powered Huawei Watch 2 last no more than two days between charges if used lightly.

If you prefer the convenience of AOD, you’ll be recharging your Gear Sport pretty much every night. Listening to music stored on the watch consumes an additional 15% of battery per hour. Using GPS services during activity tracking also consumes about 15% of charge hourly.

Recharging the Gear Sport on its wireless charging stand takes 2 and a half hours, which isn’t fast. Just to see what would happen, we tried placing the watch on a Samsung wireless charging stand, but no power would flow between the two.

Conclusion

There are many things to like about the Samsung Gear Sport. It is good-looking, it is fast and responsive, it has a great display, it lasts sufficiently long between charges, and it is durable enough to withstand some seriously wet exercises. On top of this, the addition of Spotify with offline listening support is more than welcome.

But as I mentioned earlier, there’s still room for improvement. Most notably, while the Gear Sport could be a handy companion at the gym, in the pool, or during a morning jog, it isn’t all that great at tracking actual sports. I’m not sure why that is when the Android Wear-based watch I was using before it was perfectly capable of this.

But at the end of the day, if you’re in the market for a smartwatch, the Samsung Gear Sport should be on your shortlist. While it may not be perfect in some areas, it excels in others, so even at 300, it is an option worth considering.

Cons

Samsung Gear Sport Teardown

I recently picked up the Samsung Gear Sport for the possibility of skydiving with it, tracking my daily activity, and getting notifications from my iPhone. Temptation got the best of me, and around hour one, I decided to have a look what’s inside.

Disassembly of SM-R600 (Samsung Gear Sport)

Overall, disassembly is easy. Just remove the four, 3-wing screws located in each corner. The bottom pops off with a gentle pry from a spudger. Obviously, be sure to clean off both mating surfaces before closing the unit back up for waterproofness.

Once inside, carefully remove the only screw. Be careful not to touch the pad next to the diode as that is the battery output.

Placing a piece of Mylar or similar insulator here will disconnect the battery. I would highly recommend doing that before continuing.

Removing the connector and sliding it through the carrier will disconnect the board/battery carrier from the watch face. In this shot, I removed the EMI copper tape to get a better look at the processor stack.

Here is the backside of the motherboard with two more enclosed EMI shields and the antenna front end (top right).

The backside of the carrier houses the two pins for the RF antenna to connect to the body and the haptic feedback source.

It’s interesting that they use the stainless steel body as the RF antenna. The two antenna pads can be seen above. Note the housing’s metal is sealed so these two access points are the only conductive surface on the body. Unfortunately, I don’t have a LRC meter to find out the “antenna’s” impedance, but this is an extremely interesting technique.

On the case’s backside we can see the o-ring sealed pressure sensor, wireless charging-charging coil, and window for the HR sensor. There are also three magnets that give the rotating bezel its ‘click’. I’m unsure why there is an additional MEMS pressure sensor on the main board with this submersible sensor, but it’s there. Perhaps someone that knows can drop us a line.

Wow, the display assembly packs a lot in a small space. 360×360 16M colors AMOLED display, ambient light sensor, and gesture touch sensor, all protected by Corning Gorilla Glass SR.

Components

SOC modules

Software

Linux version 3.18.14 (abuild@SWDG0804) (gcc version 4.9.2 20151028 (prerelease) (Tizen/Linaro) ) #1-Tizen SMP PREEMPT Thu Sep 21 08:49:26 UTC 2017

The 45 Sensors

To learn more about these Tizen devices, I decided to extract the various sensor’s name, manufacturer, resolution, min max, and refresh rate. Hopefully this is useful to someone.

Again, there are two pressure sensors reading from 260-1260hpa with 0.000244 resolution and 1ms maximum refresh rate.

Note: SENSOR_NOT_DEFINED_INT means the Tizen defined sensor types were not used for this sensor and there is a custom type. The proceeding int is the type value.

Technology Overview

Overall there is a metric ton of processing power, sensors and connectivity on this device. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, NFC, wireless charging, GNSS, ambient light sensor, nano pressure sensor, pressure sensor, gyro/accel/inertial measurement unit, HR monitor, haptic feedback, and temperature.

Some nifty features are wake on movement gesture, wake on voice, and voice to text. The device is not rooted and has several layers of security that are beyond the scope of this writeup. With the Tizen SDK, this device is super customizable and is a powerful platform for us hardware geeks.