Samsung Gear Sports: The most charming sports smartwatch

Samsung Gear Sport, Samsung's smartwatch model, is geared towards the school of active users, but its true functions go far beyond the gym.

The device, along with the Apple Watch Series 3, Fitbit Ionic and Misfit Vapor, has become the most suitable smartwatch for fitness enthusiasts. Samsung's Gear Sport turned into a strong competitor when officially participating in this race. The watch is beautifully designed, supports GPS and a heart rate monitor, allowing you to answer your phone or email right on your computer. Even if you don't exercise often, the Gear Sport is well worth considering.

Design

The Gear Sport doesn't look as powerful as the Gear S3 Frontier, but it feels more polished. The bezel of the Gear Sport is a lot smaller and the outer shell also feels square compared to the S3. Gear Sport's face diameter is 42mm, smaller than the S3 Frontier's 46mm. This design will be more suitable for small hands. It is also much lighter.

Gear Sport and Gear S3 Frontier

Despite its small size, the touch gestures on the Gear Sport screen do not feel difficult. The device is water resistant and withstands water pressure to a depth of 50m, you just need to activate the Water Lock mode if you plan to go swimming.

Gear Sport comes in two versions: glossy black and blue, both made of stainless steel and look extremely attractive.

Performance when exercising

Named Sport, Samsung certainly equipped this product with good functions for practice.

Gear Sport automatically recognizes user activity like walking or running. But to start training, the GPS can be used. In Samsung's Health app, users can choose between activities: running, walking, cycling or swimming. During training, the Gear Sport allows switching between three screens to display information such as step count, pace, heart rate, time and more.

Those three screens can be adjusted to their liking. However, the size of letters and numbers is quite small, making it difficult to see the indicators. If you want to use an app other than Samsung Health, you can try MapMyRun, Endomondo, Pear Personal Coach and lots of other health apps today.

Types of displays on the Gear Sport

Gear Sport has been put to the test while running and it yielded satisfactory results. However, if you are a professional runner or athlete, you should choose watches with good GPS systems such as Garmin Forerunner 235. In general, the Gear Sport is sufficient for those who exercise in basic level.

Gear Sport's GPS recognizes location quickly, but it's unclear when it will do it. It does not have a clear signal, such as a light or vibration, to indicate that the location has been recorded. The system of the device still records the exact steps, but looking back on the route you have traveled or ran also brings an interesting experience.

Gear Sport's ability to measure heart rate is quite accurate, but the results shown on the screen are the highest heart rate, not the average heart rate.

The Gear Sport watch is equipped with a barometer and manometer, in case you want to know how high you are at sea level or measure atmospheric pressure while in the mountains. It also shows how many steps a user has climbed during the day. Gear Sport records your heart rate at rest, climbing floors, steps taken and calories burned. All one-week workout history is recorded, so users can compare day-to-day indicators with the Samsung Health app. This ability is similar to the Apple Watch series.

Clock face

One of the great things about smartwatches is that you can change the watch face to your liking. In the Gear app, you can choose among hundreds of watch face models.

Press and hold on face to change to a fixed watch face. Many people like this feature because not everyone has the habit of shaking their wrist to see the time.

A few watch faces in the app store

Tizen operating system

Although Samsung has developed its own Tizen operating system, according to subjective opinion, Google's Android Wear still feels more stable. It has a logical layout, making it easier to access notifications or applications.

For Tizen, recent announcements appear when the bezel is rotated to the left. When rotated to the right, you will see the screen shows utilities such as movement index, weather and music. Swipe down from the top to see quick settings like screen brightness, battery and airplane mode.

The application screen will appear when the Gear Sport's bottom button is pressed. Here, Tizen arranges apps and features in a circular fashion. Turn the outer bezel or use your finger to select. If you hold an app on the screen, you can rearrange the apps to your liking.

Application screen of Tizen operating system

Samsung's Tizen operating system is more open than Apple's watchOS, but it's still inevitable some limitations if you use the Gear Sport with your iPhone. If connected to an iPhone, Samsung Pay cannot use, cannot listen to the phone or send a message through the watch and the number of suitable applications is still small.

However, Samsung has updated the latest One UI software for its smartwatch products. New features from the update include: improved heart rate and sleep monitoring, battery optimization for Gear Sport.

Notification system

In the event that Gear Sport connects to an Android phone, the notification system will work extremely efficiently. There are many ways to respond to emails and messages via Tizen: enter text from the screen, handwrite or reply by voice. The handwriting recognition mode works quite well and the watch has a text prediction feature that makes texting faster.

Ways to reply to messages on Gear Sport

Application

In addition to the Gear app, Samsung also has a small app store, where users can download apps and watch faces there. However, the number of applications on the Gear is still a modest number compared to on watchOS. For example, Gear doesn't have Strava, Pandora, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, not to mention a slew of Google apps. However, the two popular applications of Under Armor, MapMyRun and MyFitnessPal, capture the advantage of GPS and measure heart rate and work perfectly on the Gear Sport.

If you use Gear Sport with your iPhone, the choice of apps will be a lot less. All of the aforementioned social networking apps plus both Under Armor apps are also not available for this combination.

Battery life

When it comes to battery life, the Tizen operating system is at an average level in smartwatches. Using both GPS and the heart rate mode in a 30-minute run only made the Gear Sport lose 15% of its battery. Testers used an additional two and a half hours, the remaining battery is 57%.

The Gear Sport uses the same wireless charging pad as the Gear S3.

summary

For Android phone users, this Gear Sport is a useful accessory. Not only is it beautiful, but it also has the ability to track physical activity extremely well. If you are not a sports enthusiast, Gear Sport still has the basic functions for answering phones, messages, emails, surfing the web. However, the weakness of Tizen operating system equipment is still a modest number of applications. And even iPhone users should consider other options as the Gear Sport is limited to connecting to iOS.