As smartphone's increasingly become bigger and more powerful, so does the desire for smaller, sleeker wearable technology. Whereas a couple of years ago, 3D was the buzzword in technology circles, wearable tech seems to be the craze du jour. Only a few weeks ago, Google announced a renewed focus on wearable technology, starting with its release of several smartphone watches. The Galaxy Gear Fit is one of its current crop of werable technology. Smaller and more streamlined than some its other efforts, the Gear Fit is squarely aimed, unsurprisingly from the name, at those interested in fitness.
Lookswise, the Gear Fit is pretty stylish, its curved screen is slim but stretches across your wrist to provide a decently sized display screen. The screen itself is super AMOLED, so it's bright and attractive when the watch itself is on. This is all held together by a simple plastic strap (available in a variety of interchangeable colours) which means that the watch itself is also super light, don't be surprised if you find yourself forgetting that you're wearing it! For those interested in customisation, the watch's background display can also be customised from pre-set backgrounds, or using any of your own photos.
Looks don't mean much if the Gear Fit doesn't match up in terms of functionality however. In terms of features, the watch may be small but is pretty powerful; connecting to your Galaxy phone via bluetooth, the watch can be set to display a variety of alerts and messages, from displaying new texts to warning of new Twitter messages. This is, of course, super handy in situations where it's simply not practical to check your phone itself (in a business meeting or out for a run as two examples). There's also, in the case of the text message alerts at least, a variety of pre-set quick reply templates (these can be customised from your phone screen) which you can activate and send with a couple of taps of the watch face. The watch will also warn of incoming calls but subtly vibrating, and will then give you an option of sending the call through to your answer-phone or responding with a text.
Of course, given that this is the Gear Fit, you'd expect there to be a heavy focus on health and fitness and the watch comes loaded with several features geared towards the exercise enthusiast. As well as a whole host of timers and alarms, there's an inbuilt pedometer which is surprisingly accurate and is more than capable of working out when you're actually walking and simply shaking the watch! There's a heartrate sensor too which can be used on it's own, or alongside the 'Exercise' app, where it will continually monitor your heartrate during your run/walk/cycle/jog. The 'exercise' function is also incredibly useful for those interested in breaking down their exercise sessions into useful statistics, once you've told the watch what type of exercise you are doing it will monitor distance, heartrate, speed etc.
It's here that we encounter the first issue with the watch however, which is that, when used alongside a running app like Runkeeper or Zombies Run!, there can be quite a large discrepancy between the distance that Gear Fit and the app are reporting that you have run (sometimes up to nearly half a miles difference). While it's always worth questioning the accuracy of some of the exercise apps out there, given that the one we were using monitored speed and distance using GPS we would suggest that this is probably more accurate than the data given out by the Gear Fit (which appears to work it out using accelerometer alone!) This seems like a bit of an issue for a device which is marketing itself for the health and fitness market, much of which is driven by data, statistics and a desire to improve on both distance and time during exercise sessions.
Our other big issue is that the whole watch feels quite 'cheap'. Much of this is a trade-off for how lightweight the watch is, it uses very lightweight plastic components. Unfortunately, this does make the device feel very easy to break and the watch face itself very each to chip - hardly ideal for a device which is designed to be used for intensive exercise sessions. Battery life is also a bit of an issue, not so much for the watch itself which last a decent while, but using Bluetooth to keep the phone and watch connected will run down even the newest of smartphones in no time at all.
There are some undeniably useful features packed in to the Galaxy Gear Fit, being able to quickly check messages while on the move and some of the data it provides is undeniably useful for exercise enthusiasts. However, the expense of the device coupled with the fact that some of the data it provides is questionable in terms of accuracy, means that the Gear Fit should be approached with caution. It's likely that we're going to be hearing a lot about wearable tech in the coming years; however, judging it by the strength of Gear Fit, it definitely has yet to find its 'killer app' which will make purchasing wearable tech an essential.
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