Samsung Gear Fit Review

There are many fitness trackers in the market that works with your smartphone, they aren’t cheap and doing much purpose except keeping track of your fitness activities. If we combine fitness tracking features into a smartwatch, that will be really cool and much more useful, therefore Samsung has the answer to our request, by releasing the fitness oriented smartwatch – the Samsung Gear Fit

Video Review

Smartwatch Disguised as a Sports Band

The Samsung Gear Fit looks really attractive and futuristic, it shows an example to many on how smartwatches should really look like. The Gear Fit has a curved 1.84” Super AMOLED display and a 180MHz Cortex M4 CPU, it also features a heart rate sensor and gyro sensor. The smartwatch connects to your Samsung GALAXY Android device via Bluetooth 4.0 and is IP67 certified water and dust resistant.

The curved display and wrist band makes the smartwatch very comfortable to wear on our wrists, even if we sweat a lot, the wrist band doesn’t stink and you can purchase other colour options if you want. The Gear Fit doesn’t look like a watch at all, but more like a sports band or fitness tracker with a beautiful display that works decently under strong sunlight.

Easy to Use Operation

The Gear Fit is really easy to operate, swipe the screen to navigate between menus and press any corresponding buttons on the screen to perform actions. The touch screen is really responsive and we don’t have problems using it even if our fingers are wet.

The Gear Fit provides two viewing positions – horizontal and vertical, which enables us to wear the watch on the bottom and top of our wrist respectively. While we like the horizontal view, it made more sense to view the watch’s display in vertical, while the icons and watch faces showed up nicely, text on notifications gets wrapped up, which looks weird and cheap at the same time. Text definitely looks better on horizontal view, but you won’t want to turn your wrist every time to check on a notification.

Attractive watch faces, no support for 3rd party apps

One of the most important thing on a smartwatch is watch faces, and the Gear Fit has a few of them while you are also able to change the background picture, they all looked very colourful and has its own purpose.

The Gear Fit unfortunately doesn’t support 3rd party apps and we understand that due to the screen size limitation, so you are stuck with what you have on the watch itself. Given the fact this is meant to be a fitness tracker, we don’t really mind that limitation.

Fitness Features Complete, but not Perfect

The Gear Fit has the same set of fitness features as the Samsung Gear 2, which lets you track fitness activities such as walking, running, hiking and cycling. All of these features work great and synchronised with S-Health on our GALAXY S5. We did try out the heart rate sensor and pedometer while doing work outs and find them to be quite nice initially, until we started monitoring them really closely.

The heart rate sensor on the watch does work and measures our heart rate, though we think it sometimes senses our heart beats either too fast or too slow, and we can’t really comment on that.

The pedometer is a disappointing feature, it doesn’t keeps track of our steps accurately, even if we are sitting still on a table, moving our hands occasionally, the pedometer takes all this actions into account.

A fitness oriented device shouldn’t have such problems occurring, and we don’t see any point using the Gear Fit as a fitness tracker if this occurs.

Battery Life and Charging

We’ve been using the Samsung Gear Fit as our daily driver and paired it to our Samsung GALAXY S5, while receiving lots of notifications and using some of its fitness features, we managed to achieve an average battery life of 4-5 days.

To charge the Gear Fit, Samsung provides a charging clip similar to the Gear 2, which we don’t like it as it is very easy to misplaced it, we don’t mind if the Gear Fit has a MicroUSB port on its side covered with a rubber flap.

Verdict

The Samsung Gear Fit isn’t a true smartwatch, it is merely a fitness tracking device with a beautiful display and connected with your smartphone to receive notifications. We are disappointed with the fact that the watch isn’t able to serve us properly on its fitness features. However, if we were to consider a fashion wearable or accessory for our GALAXY smartphone, the Gear Fit can be a really good one. The Samsung Gear Fit retails at RM599, about RM300 off the better Samsung Gear 2, it will only support Samsung GALAXY devices with Android 4.3 and above.

The Good

+ Good quality display

+ Good ergonomics with curved display and comfortable wrist band

+ Reliable Bluetooth connection

+ Great battery life

+ Easy to use operation

The Bad

– Fitness features isn’t perfect

– Not able to install 3rd party apps

– Limited functionality and expensive price tag

We rate the Samsung Gear Fit at 3 out of 5 stars.