Samsung Electronics Store Gear Sport Smartwatch, Black (SM-R600NZKAXAR)

Great product, tracks movement really well and fairly easy to set up. Deffinatly recommend taking some time to customize it for you as there are a lot of options to set up.

Prior to purchasing this Samsung Gear Sport, I’ve owned/used several other smart watches over a number of years, including a Pebble, Moto 360 V2, Samsung Gear S2 and iWatch. While I think smart watches still have a way to go to meet their full potential, they do get better each year, and can be well worth their price depending on one’s needs.

Sadly interoperability is the most significant limitation with smart watches. If you have an Apple phone, only an Apple watch makes sense (and vice versa). If you have a Samsung phone, a Samsung watch usually makes the most sense. And if you have a non-Samsung Android phone, likely an Android Wear watch makes the most sense. Crossing those boundaries limit/change the functionality to varying degrees and except for Apple, manufacturers are not clear on what changes and what you lose across a boundary. Just about every model has a proprietary charging system. And most have a proprietary strap system.

If you are still reading this, you likely have or are considering a Samsung phone, or you really, really, value a particular feature of this watch over other features. So here is the review…

The Good
• The combination of rotating bezel, touch screen, and two buttons give this the best user interface that exists in any smart watch
• The 1.2″ AMOLED display has best in class efficiency, brightness and clarity
• The watch can have best in class battery life. This can dramatically vary with use and configuration but with a similar use an configuration it’s significantly better than most of the competition. Figure several weeks in watch only mode, 2-3 days typical, and 1-2 days under worst conditions.
• 50 M Water resistance so you don’t have to worry about water damage swimming, showering, washing your hands, being out in the rain, or exercising
• Great fitness and health features combined with Samsung’s Fitness application. I don’t think this is much different than you would get with Google Fit on an Android Wear watch though.
• Great build quality and fit and finish with a stainless steel case, relatively small size, and relatively light weight.
• This watch uses a standard 20mm watch bands so there are a huge number of styles and types of replacement bands offered at relatively low cost
• How notifications are handled are quite different than Android wear and I much prefer this system under the Tizen operating system (not everyone will though). In Android Wear every notification goes into the same list and you spend a lot more time looking through the list to get to what you want or get rid of many notifications. In Tizen each category of notifications have a separate list and you can go to each list and look or clear individually or clear a whole list or all lists. I find this much more efficient but not everyone will like it. Some other reviews mistakenly say you only see the latest notification but that is not true, all notifications since you last cleared them will be available (at the bottom of the first notification in a category there will be a number and you tap on that number to see the rest)

The Bad
• This is very much personal taste, but I find almost all of the built in watch faces hideous. Limited configurability, and not very readable (either bizarre format/colors or too much detail making reading at a glance difficult)
• The setting menu can be confusing with respect to navigation, selection, organization and visibility. Settings where you would not expect them, same settings in multiple places, not obvious when clicking on a setting would result in changing that setting or open up a list of more settings, a setting in one place causing a setting in another to be greyed out or invisible). Thankfully once you get it set up to your liking, you might not have to go there much and there are some quick settings for the stuff you change most often, but overall it’s about as friendly as on a Samsung Phone which is to say NOT.
• No speaker so no taking phone calls as I could on an iWatch or Gear S3

The Ugly
• S Voice / Bixby – at the moment only S Voice is available on the watch (not Bixby) and it (either actually) are nowhere near as speedy, accurate, or usable as the Google equivalents
• The watch requires a number of proprietary Samsung applications and processes to be running on the phone for full functionality. These tend to be power and resource intensive with low/slow performance in many cases. Not all of them may run on every phone and where they will not run you will lose watch functionality to varying degrees
• The watch store application you need to obtain any watch face or application not built into your watch leaves a lot to be desired. Its poorly organized, very slow, and the search feature is abysmal (often not finding something that IS in the store). If this application does not run on your particular phone you are limited to the watches build in faces and applications.
• The quantity and quality of watch faces and applications are not anywhere near that of the Android wear. Many are very buggy and can significantly degrade your watch and or phone battery life. Most remain unreviewed so there is no way to know how good a particular item may be. Most are more expensive than their Android Wear counterparts.

Conclusion

I find the “Good” compelling enough to purchase and keep the product (for a while at least). The “Bad” things are not a huge problem for me. And as long as I have a Samsung phone, I can live with the ugly. I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone without a Samsung phone, but other than that, folks will have to decide if its particular blend of functionality and flaw are worth the price to make a purchase. I’ll most an update in a few months.

** UPDATE after about 3 months **

On the great side, when the always on display featured is turned off, and your activity does not trigger an automated workout, and you use a power efficient watch face, you can get up to FIVE DAYS on a single charge. Or possibly even better, you can wear the watch 23.5×7 and can top up the charge in less than half an hour a day. This allows for pretty full tracking of both exercise/activity and sleep.

Unfortunately there are many watch faces that are not power efficient, and rather than draining 15%-20% in a full 24 hour period, some can fully deplete the battery in less than 16 hours. Workout mode, either manually selected or auto detected also produces high battery drain that can eat 30% of your battery in less than an hour. Unfortunately many of the weather watch faces (that I find most useful) frequently stop updating, and sometimes only uninstalling and re-installing the app and or service can restore correct weather reading and updates.

And also unfortunately, the accuracy of activity and sleep tracking is highly variable. It’s pretty good at step counting, but often misses actual workouts or detects them in error or detects the wrong type of workout, and stair climbing (height change) activity is absolutely abysmal. Sleep tracking is often pretty good, but in a significant minority of cases misses tracking it, or hours of it, and often if you get up in the middle of the night is somehow splits your sleep and the mornings statistics report half a nights sleep (although you can often scroll back to the previous day and see the first half of your sleep).

New conclusion:

So, this is still not where it needs to be for activity tracking. And my favorite watch faces are often unreliable. I subtracted one star, and yet another failed smart watch goes in a drawer. Maybe next year!

I’ve only had the watch for a few days. I’ve successfully configured it and used it for two workouts. I thought I’d share some of my observations. Before that, let me qualify my review. I paid full price for my watch and I am under no obligation to write a review. This is just an attempt to share my thoughts for others looking for opinions.

I have a Samsung S8+ and was looking for a smartwatch that would seemlessly integrate with the phone for email, messages and fitness tracking. I normally use my Polar H7 chest strap with iCardio 4 to track my workouts.

I found that the configuration was fairly straight forward. I watched a number of Youtube unboxing, configuration and review videos before purchasing my watch. Consequently, I knew what to expect and what to do when the box showed up at my house. I would highly recommend you do the same as the documentation is lacking… they know that most people won’t read it.

I turned off GPS and location services. I am not a jogger/runner/walker… I do not need anything tracking my movement through the gym. I turned the heart rate monitor to monitor continuously. My display is set to “7”. Going from fully charged at 6:30am to put back on the charging cradle at 11pm with 58% left on the battery. I get LOTS of emails and quite a few text messages on my phone… all of which were forwarded to my watch; including pictures sent to me by my 7yo granddaughter. So, no problem with battery life for me… 5 stars.

I didn’t buy the watch for its fitness tracking only. I wanted it for the convenience of getting notifications and email without having to pull out my phone. Not only am I able to see my email and messages, I am able to respond to them as well using S-voice. Since I’m not reviewing S-voice, I won’t tell you how much I wish that Bixby worked on this watch. My wife has an Apple iWatch and quite frankly, when comparing Siri with S-voice, I feel like the poor cousin. However, it meets my requirements for both email and messages… 5 stars.

I am trying to work with the text entry interface. I am trying to write my message into the screen and the interface recognizes all the U.S. letters and numbers I type. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get it to do anything except upper case letters. I’ll have to research the cause of this and figure out how to make it enter upper and lower case letters. As you can imagine, IT’S RUDE TO ALWAYS TYPE IN CAPS!… So, this feature is not as intuitive as I was led to believe. So, although it recognizes all the letters and numbers, there are some complications… 3 stars.

As a fitness tracker, it utilizes a proprietary bluetooth interface and therefore, doesn’t integrate with iCardio… a BIG issue for me. If I want to continue to utilize iCardio, I still need to wear my Polar H7 chest strap. Since this is not my primary use for the watch, it is an inconvenience rather than a non-starter. It integrates with S-health, which I find to be somewhat archaic in its design… not impressed with its user interface. For me personally, I will continue to utilize my chest strap for my workouts… 1 star

There has been some discussion as to the accuracy of the Gear Sport heart rate monitor. Having used both the Gear Sport/S-Healt and Polar H7/iCardo, I can give you some numbers. I did a HIIT workout:

Gear Sport: 499 Calories, 112 Avg BPM, 143 Max BPM
Polar H7: 749 Calories, 117 Avg BPM, 156 Max BPM

I have a theory about the differences and I will share it. I believe the Gear Sport measures heart rates every second. At the same time, it calculates the calorie burn and accumulates accordingly. I believe the Polar H7 measures heart rates more frequently and therefore, gets a more accurate measurement of calorie burn… as well as peak heart rates. To the average person, a one second interval between readings should be accurate enough (assuming the Polar H7 is the gold standard of heart rate monitors). I am a computer software developer myself and most people wouldn’t realize that computers measure things in microseconds… that is 6 digits to the right of the decimial (.000001). As you can imagine, a lot of things happen in the real world and on a computer within a second. When averaging heart rates and calorie burn between intervals, more data points allow for more accuracy.

In any case, I don’t really care about calorie counting… I am more interested in getting a workout completed in the correct heart rate zones. I consider the heart rate monitor to be important and calories burned to be of monumental inconsequence. I’ve measured my heart rate on three different pieces of hardware at the same time; the Polar H7, Precor Elliptical and my blood pressure cuff. All were within a couple of BPMs. Consequently, I consider the Gear Sport to be close enough to keep me in my heart rate zones and therefore, it gets 4 stars. I would give it 5 stars for this feature if it were a bit closer (less than 5 difference).

To summarize, the apps I needed (Messages, Email) work fine. The fact that I can control my Spotify is a plus. As a fitness tracker, the hardware keeps me in my zones however, the software (S-health) is truly lacking. I’m hoping that Samsung is able to get more developers working apps for their Gear products.

Suggestions to Samsung would be:
1.) Provide customized workout types on the watch. Kettlebells, Weights, HIIT, Core… etc. Seriously, who does crunches as a workout???
2.) Provide the ability to measure recovery after the workout is complete… measure and track heart rate for a two minute recovery window.

Overall: 4 stars… limited number of available apps.

Discount me prices is heavy and not discount to Samsung smart gear price is heavy prices heavy price is high

Plz dont buy this watch. They claim its water resistant, and inspite of not taking my watch in water my water was water damaged, and that too in warranty period. So now either i have to pay 7500 for the motherboard, or just throw the watch in the dustbin. I think latter would be better