Review: Samsung Gear 2 Is Mostly Better

Paying $500 for a watch is considered cheap for some people. For others, anything more than $14.99 is pushing it.

The Samsung Gear 2 sits somewhere in between. It's the company's latest smart watch that's now more stylish, more versatile and designed in a far more logical way than its predecessor. Samsung still has a few kinks to work out, but the utility of such a device is as obvious as its future is certain.

Samsung was first to market with the smart-watch concept, which connects to a host tablet or smartphone and extends the reach of notifications, texting and phone calls. But like many versions 1.0, the so-called Galaxy Gear fell short in a few important ways.

All of those issues have been fixed in Gear 2. For example, its 2 megapixel camera is now housed in the watch's metal body rather than in the strap. This allows the included strap to be replaced with a favorite Twist-o-flex or more stylish brand. Samsung also offers a selection of colors. The included strap and its folding click-latch is fairly comfortable and looks nice enough, but vinyl tends to get clammy in hot weather and click-latches have been known to loosen up over time.

Also new is an IR emitter, which turns the watch into a remote control for TVs, cable boxes and other electronics using the included OnWatch app. Located next to the camera, the emitter is in just the right place to be oriented perfectly when tapping remote controls on the watch face. Incidentally, we found it remarkable that the LED somehow knew whenever we needed it to come to life to display the time. By default, the backlight dims and shuts off 10 seconds later.

On a full charge, the battery lasted five days before it issued the standard Android low-battery warning. The included charger, which clips onto the back of the watch and accepts a micro-USB connector, charged the battery in less than two hours.

Gear 2's most significant new feature is perhaps its ingress protection rating of IP-67. That means that it's totally impervious to dust and can be submerged in water three feet deep for half an hour.

What's inside is worth protecting. There's a 1 GHz dual-core processor (one core more than its predecessor) plus an accelerometer and gyro.

New in Gear 2 is a heart-rate monitor that's located on the underside and works with several included fitness apps. The 1.6-inch, 320 x 320 pixel screen is quite bright and perfectly visible indoors or out. An outdoor mode temporarily brightens the screen.

The Gear 2 user interface is straightforward. Pressing the Home button displays the current watch face, an app that occupies the entirety of what is actually the Android Home screen. Swiping left or right brings up the remaining four pages of apps just as on any Android device. Swiping down from the top is the equivalent of the back button. The device comes with a few digital and analog watch faces; a few dozen more are available in the Samsung Gear Apps Store. Most are free.

Many Gear settings can be accessed right on the watch itself. Those and others also can be controlled from the host smartphone or tablet through Gear Manager, a Control Panel-like app that connects to the Gear 2 via Bluetooth 4.0 and can download and push apps, wallpapers and watch faces, invoke a "Find my Gear" feature and set up notifications.

There's also a setting to connect any single app to a double-press of the Home button. Long-pressing the Home button presents power, restart and sound settings as on other Android devices along with the Outdoor mode toggle.

Gear Manager provides total control over which apps on the host device will be allowed to send notifications to the watch, which helps to minimize interruptions and maximize battery life. We set ours to notify of new mail and texts, upcoming meetings and weather alerts. Alerts can be blocked when the watch is in use or can show a preview of the message or play a sound only. The watch also can be configured to automatically lock whenever it has lost its connection to the host.

We were generally impressed with the features and operation of the Gear 2, particularly for its utility as a remote screen for a pocketed phone and as a relay for listening to music. It also can now play music to a Bluetooth headset from files stored locally in its 4 GB of storage without the host.

Not all the Gear 2 news is good. About halfway through our week-long series of tests, an update to Gear Manager caused the phone to lose its connection to the host phone and nothing we did would bring it back. Check that. We did discover one thing that worked: changing the host. We downloaded Gear Manager to a Galaxy TabS and disabled automatic updates to make sure we wouldn't download the errant code. A factory reset of the watch also was required.

Listing for $299, Samsung's Gear 2 is a capable device that provides adequate added value and convenience for users of high-end Samsung devices running Android, particularly smartphones.

The wearable tech market is expected to top $5 billion this year and more than double by 2017, according to stats portal statista.com. With three current smartwatch models and the SIM-based Gear S available soon, Samsung is well positioned to pull a repeat performance of its smartphone success.

PUBLISHED NOV. 7, 2014