In August last year, I
decided I’d had enough with smartwatches. I didn’t swear off them forever,
but I did find them too distracting to be worth the interruptions.
Add in the mostly clunky, oversized designs, interfaces that
were difficult to navigate and functionality I just didn’t value enough.
With more than a year now passed without regularly wearing a
smartwatch, and the opportunity to put the new Gear
S2 through its paces, I decided it was time to get back on the metaphorical
horse.
Why now?
Part of the reason I’m willing to give Samsung’s newest
smartwatch a chance is the new approach to design – it comes in a
few different versions but they all have a rotating bezel reminiscent
of a regular watch.
The model I’ve been wearing for the last 24-hours is the S2
Classic with a regular 20mm pin watch strap, which means you can take any standard
watch strap and swap it out.
Unfortunately, due to the proprietary connector on the
non-Classic versions, you can’t swap these bands out with regular straps.
I wasn’t given a choice of model to test, but had I been, it
would have been the Classic, as I prefer the leather strap and the notched edge
of the bezel. People who want a ‘sportier’ looking smartwatch would perhaps
prefer to opt for the S2.
Given that I’ve only been using it for a short time, I
obviously can’t comment on things like reliability, battery life and the other
sorts of niggles that only arise once you’ve been using a device for a while,
but it makes one hell of a first impression.
Part of my frustration at early smartwatches was
functionality for the sake of it, at the cost of design.
Take the original Galaxy Gear, for example, it had a
freaking camera on it. Yes, it was sort of cool to feel like a spy for a couple
of minutes, but taking a photo with your wrist makes you look like a total
weirdo – no exceptions. The other side of that is that including a camera
module pushed up the price and compromised the overall design, as it had to be
incorporated into the strap.
The original Gear’s watch strap camera
There’s none of that sort of excess here but it still
provides the sort of functionality you might want from a smartwatch, like
activity tracking, the ability to personalize watch faces to your heart’s
content and support for other apps to extend its use. This isn’t the Gear S2’s
strongest point, however, as it runs Samsung’s proprietary Tizen platform,
rather than Android Wear.
While this will put some people off, it also allows Samsung
to do a few things that it says wouldn’t be possible if it ran Android Wear.
That rotating bezel that lets you scroll beautifully through
different options and information would be a whole lot more clunky if it was
running Google’s wearable OS; at least, that’s what a Samsung exec told me.
Without another manufacturer trying to implement it on Android Wear, it’s hard
to really tell.
Either way, what Samsung has created with the simple
addition of a rotating bezel control is a method of interaction that feels a
whole lot more ‘natural’ for a watch – you can, of course, still use the
touchscreen to navigate too if you prefer.
Perhaps it’ll be a generational difference. Perhaps anyone
who’s grown up in the last 10 years or so will instinctively go straight for
the touchscreen, but for me – a child of the 80s – the bezel really makes a
huge difference to how I feel about using it.
It’s weirdly addictive to sit there and just keep spinning
it.
Less, not more
Part of my issue with using earlier smartwatches is just how
efficient they are at their primary purpose – keeping you in touch with all
your notifications.
It’s really handy to catch a glance of that super-important
email while you’re in a meeting without having to interrupt everything. It’s a
lot less pleasing to have that reminder while you’re in the middle of cooking
or eating dinner.
With no way to really control what got through, turning off
all notifications was the only way to fix the situation. And a smartwatch with
no notifications is a watch.
The S2 goes a long way to sorting out that particular
problem by allowing you to control (via the Gear Manager app) the notifications
that are allowed to interrupt you.
Clearly, this isn’t a full ‘review’ or anything approaching
it; I’ll have to live with the Gear S2 for a little longer than one day to see
how much real-world use it gets but first impressions are good, which isn’t
always the case for smartwatches.
Being based on Tizen will likely throw up problems of app
availability and support, but Samsung has made sure there are a couple of big
names pre-loaded out of the box.
At $300 (or £299) it’s hard to think that the Gear S2
is a must-have from what I’ve seen so far, but for people who like the flexibility
of notifications on their wrist, this is the best smartwatch Samsung has made
so far.
Source: TheNextWeb
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