SAMSUNG GALAXY GEAR: HIT OR MISS?

SAMSUNG GALAXY GEAR: HIT OR MISS?

Yep, they’ve gone and done it again, as if there weren’t enough super cool Galaxy devices this year. They just had to release another one. And this time they went…yes, James Bond style. What am I talking about? Enter the Samsung Galaxy Gear, the Korean smartphone giant’s latest gizmo. Now before you get any ideas, the Galaxy Gear is not a phone, as it were, it’s a smartphone accessory, which allows you to read notifications, control music playback, and of course keep time. But it does more than just that, in addition to its basic features; Samsung threw in a 1.9-megapixel camera, a speaker and two microphones, allowing you to shoot videos in 720p, make and receive calls.

The device sports a 1.63 inch Super AMOLED display, with a 320 x 320 screen resolution, a single core 800 MHz Exynos processor, and a very useful 4 gigabytes of onboard storage. It has a metal face and buckle, and comes in six different colours, so you’ll have a wide variety of options to choose from.

Now as I said earlier, the Galaxy Gear is a smartphone accessory, which means for you to access its full functionality, you’ll have to tether it via Bluetooth, to a Galaxy device, you cannot, for instance make calls or receive notifications, if the Gear is too far from your Galaxy smartphone. Currently, the only supported smartphones are the newly announced Galaxy Note III and Note 10.1 2014 edition, but compatibility updates for the Galaxy S4, S3 and Note II are due in October.

Apart from the basic features of the device, it also has the ability to find your Galaxy Smartphone via the Galaxy Gear or vice-versa, and comes with a nice plethora of apps (currently over 70 Gear specific apps). In addition it supports Samsung S-voice, which means the gear can be used to give commands to your Galaxy device remotely, pretty cool huh? The apps are installed on the Gear via the gear manager app on your smartphone.

The Samsung Galaxy Gear falls into a category of device known as smartwatches, and if there’s one thing these devices have in common, it’s that they’re not terribly smart. The Galaxy Gear, when tested, found it hard to read certain gestures that it supports, and there was a considerable amount of lag whenever you tried to do anything on the device and the inbuilt speaker makes it impractical for you to use for making calls in any conditions except a completely quiet area, and what good is that if when you try to show it off outside, you end up shouting like a primary school teacher? Another thing that really dulled my enthusiasm for the device was the lack of music playback; it only serves as a remote control for playback on your smartphone. And then there was the battery, why Samsung? Why? Such a beautiful device, what is a 315mAh, battery possibly supposed to accomplish?

All said and done, the device is pretty cool, if you’re looking for a toy, but at $300 dollars (45,000 NGN), is it really worth it?