After making five smartwatches with either square or rectangular displays, Samsung now has a round-faced model that improves on its predecessors in other ways as well. Read on for Store's review of the new Samsung Gear S2.
- The Gear S2 is so close to being the best smartwatch you can buy that its bizarre missing pieces are that much more frustrating. It has an awesome new navigation method, handles notifications much better than any previous Samsung Gear and looks pretty good to boot.
Say you're on the go, maybe one or both of your hands are full, and you think of something you need to do later on. Maybe pay a bill, buy a gift for your niece or set up a doctor's appointment. Sounds like the perfect job for that US$300 device that you're wearing on your wrist, right? Though you can't watch Netflix or play Grand Theft Auto on a smartwatch, things like reminders are a perfect fit, no?
Well, apparently Samsung doesn't agree. If the watch you're wearing on your wrist is the Gear S2, you're going to have to put down what you're doing, pull out your phone and create the reminder the old-fashioned way.
Not exactly the end of the world, but it's one less reason to bother wearing a product that's non-essential to begin with.
Nobody needs a smartwatch. They can't replace smartphones and the ones that look good are relatively expensive for something that duplicates functionality you already have on your phone. So smartwatch-makers need to give us as many compelling reasons as possible to buy them. Make the core experience as airtight as possible, add as much convenience as possible, and maybe then we'll buy enough of them so that developers are motivated to make enough killer apps for them, so that maybe someday they'll become something close to essential.
But when I tell the Gear S2's virtual assistant, S Voice, to create a reminder, I have no idea if the feature is unsupported or just plain buggy:
Me: "Create a reminder."
S Voice: "What is the subject?"
Me: "Pay my power bill."
S Voice: "Sorry, your request couldn’t be processed. Please try again later"
... okay, let's try this another way.
Me: "At 3 pm, remind me to pay my power bill."
S Voice: "Unfortunately that is not supported."
Is this an error that couldn't be processed, or are reminders just not supported? We reached out to a Samsung PR representative a day ago and have yet to hear back. So not only can we not create reminders on the Gear S2, it isn't even clear whether they'resupposed to be supported or not.
Not a good way to make a killer smartwatch, Samsung.
Third-party app support is another weakness, albeit one that Samsung has less control over. Once you get past marquee big-name apps that sit front and center in the Samsung Gear Apps store (like Yelp, ESPN, CNN and Bloomberg), there's an enormous drop-off, where you're left sifting through endless flashlight apps and watch faces.
There aren't any of the big note-taking apps like Evernote or OneNote, no popular music streaming services (unless you count Samsung's Milk Music), no ubiquitous fitness apps like Runkeeper or Runtastic (though Samsung's built-in S Health is quite good this time around) and not even any third-party task-creating apps to fill in that hole.
Android Wear and watchOS have all of the above.
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