note: October 2014 – this product not well-received by consumer. New concept launch expected soon. DA…

The Samsung Galaxy Gear is a watch. Shocking but true.

You can customise the way it looks and how it tells you the time with several face options and the choice of ten pre-loaded clock types. So far so good.

But what makes it smart? It notifies users of incoming messages, such as calls, texts, emails and alerts, delivers a preview of those messages and creates the opportunity for users to accept or discreetly ignore those messages.

In the past, some have seen Samsung’s design as plasticky and cheap, the Samsung Galaxy Gear is not. With an aluminium face and a rubber wrist-strap, it feels much more premium than the Pebble. It’s not small, with a 1.63-inch screen, 11.1mm thickness and a width of 36.8mm, some would call it chunky, but we don’t mind that in a watch.

The Galaxy Gear does have voice smarts and you can also take calls on the device. Taking calls, the quality matched that of a mobile device and the loudspeaker is good enough to use but we’d opt to pair it with a set of Bluetooth headphones. Although it works, you still feel like a prize idiot when taking calls, a bit like when using Google Glass.

In simple terms this new ‘smartwatch’ piggybacks your existing smartphone but puts a lot of the functions on your wrist where it’s arguable that you need them most. But it’s more than that, it also comes with some hardware and software smarts of its own that makes it more than just a satellite of the Android device in your pocket.

It comes with 4GB of internal storage, 512MB RAM and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity.

This is a good looking watch. It’s suitably techy so you get some welcome futurist gravitas but it’s also been designed with enough style to ensure it’s something you’d actually be happy to wear.

That’s made all the easier by the fact the Gear will launch with six colour options: Jet Black, Mocha Gray, Wild Orange, Oatmeal Beige, Rose Gold, and Lime Green.

producer: samsung
period: 2013