Samsung Galaxy Gear Smartwatch: Everything you need to know

Who needs a plain, old mechanical watch when you can have a smart one? The smartwatch seems to be the flavour of the season with the biggest names in tech either planning to launch one, or already starting to send theirs out. Samsung too dipped its toes into the smartwatch market yesterday and unveiled its Galaxy Gear smartwatch at the IFA 2013 in Berlin.

The Galaxy Gear smartwatch has been showcased less as a watch and accessory for your wrist and more as a companion to your smartphone. It’s worth mentioning that Samsung has been crafty enought to ensure that the smartwatch is compatible only with its Galaxy range of phones, and even more sadly, with only the company’s high-end phones. When the smartwatch makes its way out, it will only work with the Galaxy Note 3. However, there are software updates lined up for Galaxy S4, S3 and Note 2 to give them Gear support.

The Galaxy Gear is more an accessory than a watch

Compatibility issues aside, the Galaxy Gear smartwatch has some really impressive features. This piece of wearable tech can be used to check out notifications on your phone and even respond to them. So if you’ve received a message on your phone, you can accept or dismiss it using the Galaxy Gear, without needing to fish your phone out of your pocket.

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The Galaxy Gear also comes bundled with a Smart Relay feature that ensures that the content of the notification is pulled up in the smartphone as soon as you remove it from your pocket. The Gear is literally like a remote control for your phone on most occasions. Think this is an exaggeration, well, think again.

Looks a little clunky

Thanks to the Gear’s auto lock feature, the wearable device will lock your smartphones’s screen the moment it’s more than 1.5 meters away from it. In order to have the screen unlocked again, you can simply bring your phone into the vicinity of the Galaxy Gear. Same goes with the Find My Device capabilities of the Galaxy Gear. The feature will help you locate your phone if you think you’ve misplaced it by making it beep or illuminate and vibrate.

There’s also a camera on the Galaxy Gear you can use to shoot pictures and record important information. The watch comes with a 1.9-megapixel shooter which will be placed on the wristband. The camera works with the Memographer feature which also lets you make quick notes and takes voice memos. What’s more, you can even flick through a gallery of these images on the Gear.

Comes with a 1.9-megapixel camera

As far as the technical specifications go, the Galaxy Gear will leave you slightly, if not wholly, impressed. The smartwatch has a 1.63-inch Super AMOLED screen with a resolution of 320 x 320. Now, this may be a far cry from the 3-inch display and 4-megapixel camera rumours were suggesting, but it’s a start. Another slight disappointment is that the Galaxy Gear does not have a flexible screen. However, there’s always the hope that the mythical Apple iWatch will have a flexible screen and a slap-on feature.

The Galaxy Gear houses a 800MHz processor and runs on a decent 512MB RAM. It has 4GB of memory space, enough to hold on to most of your memos and images. The 1.9-megapixel camera is capable of taking 10-second 720p videos and contains an auto-focus lens and a BSI sensor. You can also talk into the Galaxy Gear thanks to its two microphones and a speaker. One of these microphones will be noise cancelling. The Galaxy Gear will also have an accelerometer and a gyroscope.

But what’s a smart device minus applications? Samsung has ensured that the Galaxy Gear smartwatch is shipped with enough applications to satiate the need to have a wearable. You will be able to load these applications onto the smartwatch using Samsung Gear manager from your phone. There are the usual-suspect applications like RunKeeper and MyFitnessPal that will keep a tab on your health and workouts, using the Galaxy Gear as a pedometer. The Nike Fuel Band connection is pretty hard to miss for all smartwatch makers, including Pebble, apparently.

Available in a variety of colours

To ensure better note-taking experience, the Galaxy Gear will also have sharing apps like Evernote. Surprisingly, even Path has come up with an application for the smartwatch, and will aim to make sharing moments easier for users. Other applications – there are about 70 of them at launch – for the Galaxy Gear include Line, TripIt, Glympse and eBay.

One aspect that is decidedly going to go against the Galaxy Gear smartwatch is its abysmally low battery life. While you would feel that winding your wristwatches before you left home was something only your grandfather did, the Galaxy Gear will make you feel like you’re still living in the 1960s. This time, however, you will not need to wind the watch to work, but charge your smartwatch to work. The Galaxy Gear will come with a 315mAh battery and will connect with your smartphones using Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy. This will only lend the smartwatch of “about a day” of battery life. If you were expecting this smartwatch to be your companion on a vacation or a road trip, you’re in for a major disappointment.

Still want to get one?

For those of you who’ve still managed to come this far believing that you really do need this accessory, the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch starts to ship in late September alongside the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, globally. The smartwatch will burn a hole of $299 (Rs 20,000 approx.) in your pocket. If you’re in the US or Japan, though, you’ll have to wait till early October to get your hands on it though.

At launch the smartwatch will be available in six colours – black, grey, orange, beige, gold and green. Ignore the chunky design and the ultra-vivid colours and you could possibly make the Samsung Galaxy Gear pass off as a real watch.