Review: Samsung Gear Fit

Have you jumped on the wearable tech bandwagon yet? The Gear Fit is the latest device to hit the market, and Samsung is hoping that fitness fanatics and smartwatch fans will take to it.

The Gear Fit is part fitness tracker, part smartwatch. Not only will it measure your steps and exercise each day, it will also hook up with your smartphone to allow you to get notifications of calls, texts, instant messages and emails on your wrist. You can even control your music with it.

Samsung ditched Android this time around and opted for open source system Tizen. Officially the reason for this is that it makes it more customisable, so you can change backgrounds and watch faces to something that suits your individual style.

The good . . .
The curved AMOLED colour touch screen is definitely one of the high points of the Gear Fit. It's bright, it's reactive and it's easy to read even when it's on your wrist. Swiping through the options on screen is simple. Above all, it's comfortable to wear. Regular smartwatches can be bulky, but the Gear Fit is more discreet.

The battery life is decent too – you get two to three days out of a full charge, a vast improvement on other smartwatches, especially Samsung’s original Gear. However, there is one niggle: charging requires a micro USB cable (good) plugged into a cradle (bad). Yet another thing to lose or forget to carry.

However, given that the Bluetooth is constantly on, and the Gear Fit is always monitoring your movement, you get a few hours’ grace between your charging reminder and the time it will actually shut off, which is a point in its favour.

The bad . . .
The Gear Fit is designed to work with Galaxy handsets only, so if you have another Android device, you won't be able to use it. And without the phone link, your Gear Fit is hobbled.

You still need the handset to customise it through the Gear Manager app, so even changing the clock face has to be done through your phone. It seems unnecessary to draft in the smartphone for something so minor. And obviously you won’t be able to get notifications from your smartphone, which leaves you what essentially amounts to a rather expensive pedometer.

The price is also a little steep – at almost €200, it’s more expensive than the JawBone Up or the Fitbit Flex, both of which monitor activity and sleep out of the box. And on the smartwatch front, it also works out more expensive than the original Pebble, which not only has a decent amount of features and apps available, but also links up with any smartphone – iPhone or Android.

. . . & the rest
The heart rate monitor gives this band something extra over regular wearable fitness trackers. No need for an additional strap to measure your heart rate while you are exercising, which takes away some of the expense and hassle. Originally, this proved a bit of a problem - it simply refused to check the heart rate while running, so to check heart rate mid session, you had to stop, end your exercise session on the watch, take your pulse reading and start again. That would have been a major flaw but the newest version of the software will allow it to take before and after readings, and also monitor it throughout. A quick reset and it was all working as it should.

The standalone heart rate monitor can be hit and miss though. At times it refuses to give a reading - stay still, don’t talk, clean the sensor - and on more than one occasion, it gave a wildly different reading about 10 seconds apart.

All your activity and health information is pushed to S Health on your phone, so you can keep track of everything from your daily step count to your runs and cycles, track your heart rate or your sleep patterns. Using the S Health app, you can set goals for your workouts, and get feedback on the watch.

The pedometer isn’t perfect but it gives reasonably accurate readings. The one down side is that you have to activate it yourself, although once you’ve done it initially, you don’t have to keep activating it.

You can download additional apps to expand the Gear Fit's usefulness, such as sleep trackers, or link it up with RunKeeper and the like to track your activity. Sleep tracking, like most similar devices, is based on your movement,

The verdict
The Gear Fit is a vast improvement over previous efforts. But it still needs a bit of work – something that no doubt Samsung will take into account in the coming months.

Star rating