Samsung Gear Fit Review

Introduction

The Samsung Gear Fit is a device that looks like it comes from the future: with its new-fashioned curved display and extremely light footprint, it looks like a gadget straight out of a Star Trek fantasy. At its core, it’s a cross-over between a smartwatch and a fitness tracker, showing you the time, as well as tracking your steps.

The Gear Fit has a few tricks up its sleeve as well, like a heart-rate monitor and a coaching mode that can set the exercise pace for runners and cyclers. It also vows to last up to 5 days on a single charge. Can the Fit live up to all its promises? And is it really the best of the two worlds of smartwatches and fitness trackers, or a jack of all trades, but master of none? Let’s find out.

In the box:

• Charging add-on clip
• Wall charger
• User Manual

Design

The Gear Fit has the looks of a Star Trek gadget, with a curved display and a compact, minimalist body which you can almost forget that you’re wearing.

The combination of a futuristic curved display and an amazingly light minimalistic body, makes the Gear Fit feel decidedly outworldly. And if we had to guess where Samsung drew inspiration for the Fit, we’d be quick to remember the eyepiece of Star Trek’s Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge or even Robocop’s attire. The Gear Fit truly looks like a gadget from a sci-fi movie.

Wearing the Fit is also nothing like wearing other popular wearables such as the Samsung Gear or the Pebble smartwatches - it’s more of a bracelet than a smartwatch, and at times you simply forget you have it on you, it’s simply that airy, weighing less than an ounce (27g). In comparison, the original Pebble weighs 1.34 ounces, while the Samsung Gear 2 tips the scales at more than double the Fit - 2.4 ounces.

While the Gear Fit has a decidedly inconspicuous feel, its looks are nothing but conspicuous. We’ve worn the Pebble for months and we’ve tried the Galaxy Gear for a few days, but none of them has gotten even close to the oohs and aahs the Gear Fit gets when you wear it. After Google Glass, this is probably just the second wearable device that sparks such genuine interest from bystanders, but unlike Glass, it does not have that weird, ‘Peeping Tom’ vibe.

The actual build of the device consists of fairly mundane materials - it’s mostly plastic, with a silver outline that you might mistake for metal (it’s not - it’s just plastic with a chrome finish), and it’s all very tightly put together. Those modern looks are backed up nicely by the Fit’s protection from the elements, so you can easily shower with it and not worry about it getting wet in the rain. It’s IP67-certified, which means that it’s protected from dust and it can withstand submersion in water of up to 3 feet deep for as long as 30 minutes (we would not risk to swim with it in salty water, though).

Bands

The Gear Fit timepiece is easily detachable from its band, and that’s good news, as it means that you can easily change those bands. The Fit arrives with a sporty, rubbery black band, but additional ones can be purchased separately, and Samsung is offering grey, blue, green, orange and red colors. The rubbery design is the only one you can get at the moment, and since the Gear Fit has a peculiar and rather unique form, there won't be many other custom bands at the beginning. With time, though, we could still see such custom bands from third-party accessory makers.

Display

The display is a showcase of what AMOLED can do: it has a nice ergonomic curve to it, and the deep blacks and great contrast add to the experience.

The most fascinating part of the Gear Fit is the curved display with its peculiar long rectangular form, giving the whole device its distinct and modern bracelet-styled look. We are looking at a Super AMOLED touchscreen measuring just 1.84 inches in diagonal, with a resolution of 432 x 128 pixels. This translates into a very reasonable pixel density of 244ppi - not super high-res, but more than enough for users to make out even smaller text on the display.

The screen itself looks gorgeous: a showcase of what AMOLED technology is capable of with great contrast, deep blacks, rich and saturated, eye-popping colors. Typically for AMOLED, viewing angles are also great, and the picture doesn’t little of its vibrancy even if you glance at the screen from an extremely narrow angle.

Since the Gear Fit is meant to be used for quick-glancing information, you’d often use it outdoors. Luckily, you can adjust the display to very high brightness levels to see it better on even brighter days, but in less challenging conditions, keeping it around mid brightness gets the job done (and allows the Fit to last longer). Unfortunately, it cannot adjust its brightness automatically, so you’d have to manually set it to your liking.

Interface

The Gear Fit features a simple touch and tap interface similar to that on a smartphone, but with more limited features, focused around showing you the time, weather, and fitness information.

The Gear Fit runs on something referred to as a ‘real-time operating system’ (RTOS), rather than on Android or Tizen. An RTOS is a much simpler platform than is tailor-made to complete specific tasks, but does not have the flexibility and versatility of more complex OSes. Put simply, you cannot put apps on the Fit - its RTOS is limited to what Samsung has already pre-loaded. There is also no software development kit (SDK) for Samsung’s wearable, and hence, there is no way for developers to code for it. What Samsung has done, though, is release an SDK so that developers can allow their apps to send notifications to the Gear Fit.

Why has Samsung picked the limited RTOS over richer platforms like Android or Tizen? The answer likely lies in the fact that such a barebones OS can make do with very humble hardware that consumes very little energy. This is what allows the Fit both to be compact and to last three to four days on average, something that other devices with color displays will find hard to match.

Another issue of the Gear Fit is its limited compatibility - the band works only with Samsung phones, and not even all of them. Right now, the Fit is compatible with 17 Samsung devices including the latest Galaxy S5, the S4, S III, Note III, Note 2, and others.

The interface itself is easy to grasp - it’s based on touching and tapping, just like on a smartphone. At the time of this writing, Samsung has already added support for both landscape and portrait orientation for the display. Initial prototypes of the Gear Fit had landscape support only and that made it a bit hard to read, but with portrait mode now available, there are no longer such issues.

Companion app and customization options

You set up the Gear Fit and customize its looks and functionality via Samsung’s official Gear Fit Manager application that you download for free from the Samsung app store. This app is where you first pair the Fit to your phone (via Bluetooth 4.0 LE), and you’d need it if you want to load up custom wallpapers, watchfaces, or to just re-arrange the icons on the bracelet.

The application features a set of wallpapers optimized for the long and narrow display of the Fit, and you can crop images from your phone as well, and load them up as background art. You can actually change the wallpaper on the Fit itself, but there, you only have a small sub-set of pre-defined images, and to load up new ones, you’d need the companion app.

Functionality

You unlock the Gear Fit by either pressing on the single physical key on its side, or by raising your hand in a natural motion towards your eyes, just as you’d do when you look at a traditional watch. The unlocking with motion works okay most of the time, but there is a slight delay until the screen turns on. This is a bit of a nuisance when all you want to do is check the time. It’s also very annoying when the screen refuses to turn on, and you have to repeat the gesture over and over again (something that can get embarassingly weird or funny when you’re in public). We tested whether the screen would mistakenly turn on when you walk, and we can say that it almost never does, but if you’re working out or exercising, for instance, it does occasionally turn itself on, mistaking your movements for attempts to unlock it. Still, with all its quirks, turning the screen on is our preferred method of waking the device since it does not require you to use both your hands. We ought to mention that the screen turns off after a few seconds (you can change screen timeout to up to 5 minutes, but that would worsen battery life), so you would need to wake it up every time you want to glance the time, weather, steps or something else.

Once unlocked, you have the main screen which you can customize to show you one of the following things: clock + weather, clock + upcoming calendar meeting, clock + steps, dual clock, just (a fancy) clock.

In addition to the main screen, you have four additional menu pages that you can swipe between. Each of them houses three icons. Here are all the functions on the Gear Fit: notifications, media controller, pedometer, exercise (running, cycling, hiking), heart rate, sleep, timer, stopwatch, find my device, and settings.

Notifications

The Gear Fit might not support third-party apps, but it shows you notifications from all kinds of different apps from native email, to calendar, Facebook, Viber, and all others that have implemented the feature. Such a rich notification system is welcome, as other popular wearables like the Pebble, for instance, cannot receive notifications from all that many apps, plus some have a problem with non-Latin text encodings. None of those issues are present on the Fit.

It would vibrate and light up when you receive a call or a text message. For calls, you can reject or reject and send the single pre-defined text reply: “I’ll call you later”, but you cannot actually talk on the Fit, unlike the Gear 2. For text messages, you can read the whole message on the smart bracelet, and you have a few pre-defined replies that you can send straight from the wearable. The same holds true for email – you can read full emails, as well as send quick pre-defined replies via the Samsung email app. Notifications for third-party apps like say Facebook, Whatsapp, Gmail or Viber happen in a very similar manner, but unlike calling, SMS and email (that are considered first-party apps), you cannot reply to these notifications from the Fit.

Finally, we ought to mention that deleting messages on the Gear Fit is an unnecessarily complicated task. Imagine a situation when someone sends you a few lines on Facebook - in Facebook’s traditional interface this would count as a single message. Not on the Gear Fit, though - every line will be counted as a separate message and you’d have to delete every single one of those to clear up your notifications box. We hope Samsung finds a way to fix this (at least for popular apps like Facebook) in the near future.

Gear Fit as a fitness tracker

The Gear Fit is more than just a beautiful curved screen that you can wear on your wrist, though. It has aspirations as a fitness tracker, and your journey with it towards better health starts with setting up a profile. You’d need to tell the Fit how old you are, what’s your sex, as well as how your height and weight. After you’re done with this, you can start getting fitter.

Pedometer - this is the feature that records the distance you travel by keeping track of the steps you take, a must-have feature for any fitness tracking gadget. Keep in mind that the pedometer does not record your steps unless you start it first - only then, it will start running in the background. For us, that's just plain weird for a device with aspirations as a fitness tracker: such features are expected to be turned on by default - it makes no sense for the user to have to worry remembering to turn on fitness tracking features on a... fitness tracker!

After this sore start, the Gear Fit set us a goal of 10,000 daily steps and we started looking at the accuracy of each step tracked. While in most cases, it got it right, every once in a while it erred, so that the final readings were not as accurate as you’d get with a dedicated tracker.

Right on the fit, you can see your steps for the past few days in a graph, so you don’t have to turn to your device for this. The pedometer, however, does sync your daily steps with the S Health app, and there you can see more detailed reports for longer periods of time.

Heart rate monitor - while pedometers are at the core of most fitness trackers, the Gear Fit’s signature feature is somewhat different. It’s got a dedicated heart-rate monitor, a feature that is missing on most other popular trackers.

The technology of measuring your pulse, or your heart rate, is not complicated - a dedicated sensor beams infrared light onto the veins of your forearm, and it shows you your pulse by calculating what’s reflected back. This simple mechanism, however, turns out to be very fiddly in real-life.

There are just too many conditions that you have to adhere to in order to get your heart rate - you need to keep still and quiet for an excruciatingly long 10 seconds. We tried getting our heart rate while walking, and this would simply fail - your hand needs to be still. Finally, the readings themselves are not continuous, and even worse - not always accurate. We measured our pulse after a basketball game and got readings of 110 beats per minute and 55 beats per minute within a minute! With all this in mind, the whole idea of a heart-rate monitor on the Fit becomes moot - those who really care about their heart rate would probably prefer a dedicated medical-grade oximeter that gives accurate and continuous measurements.

Exercise mode (running, cycling, hiking) - while the pedometer is an independent function of the Gear Fit (it runs even when the Fit is disconnected from the phone), the exercise mode - sadly - is bound to your smartphone. In order to start tracking your cycling exercise, for instance, you’d need a phone connection to get your location. We like to go on short bike rides without a big smartphone dangling in our pocket - unfortunately, if you want to get some exercise data, that’s not possible with the Fit - it’s not a truly autonomous device. If you have it connected to a phone, though, it does a good job on tracking your trip.

The Gear Fit also has a fairly unique coaching mode, one area where the heart-rate sensor is being put to use. You basically select the type of exercise you’d be doing, tighten up the Gear Fit snugly, and go on your merry way - the wearable would let you know whether you need to speed up, slow down, or keep up your pace depending on your heart rate. Sounds neat, but given the mixed results we got with the heart rate alone, we wonder how accurate this advice really is. We tried running with the coach setting the tempo, and - a bit frustratingly - it told us to slow down after a couple of minutes of turtle-paced running.

Sleep monitor - the Gear Fit also keeps track of your sleep, but just like all previous features, you have to manually start that sleeping mode everytime you go to bed. We just wished the bracelet would automatically detect when we go to sleep, but alas, it’s not doing that.

What does sleep mode do? Not much at the moment. It does not integrate with S Health yet (we expect Samsung to bring such support soon), and it only shows you how long you’ve ‘slept’ (the time since you pressed the ‘start’ and ‘stop’ button), and the percentage of ‘motionless’ hours during your sleep. No sleep cycles, no detailed breakdown, nothing. We do expect, though, that Samsung will improve on the limited sleep functions of the Fit in the very near future.

The timer and stopwatch features are straightforward, and work just as you’d expect them to. There’s also a ‘find my device’ feature, but unfortunately, we could not get it to work just yet.

Processor

Under the hood, the Gear Fit is powered by a rather modest ST-Microelectronics chip going by the STM32F439 model name. It’s a Cortex-M4-based solution that is more of a microcontroller than a full-fledged processor. At a maximum supported clock of 180MHz, this chip is far less powerful than what’s used in other wearables like the Samsung Gear (the gear runs at up to 1GHz), but in exchange for this, it consumes a staggeringly low amount of power.

Battery life and charging

The Gear Fit ships with a 210mAh battery, but battery capacity alone won’t tell you much about how long this new type of a device lasts. Samsung claims that you should get 3-4 days between charges, and if you use the Fit rarely, you can expect up to 5 days. We found these official numbers matching our real-world experience, as even with our more intense tests, the Fit lasted over three days on a single charge.

Charging the device, though, is an interesting process. To make such an outworldly design possible, Samsung had to resort to some tricks. The most notable one is that you won’t find a charging port anywhere on the Gear Fit. It’s just not there - instead, Samsung includes a magnetic clip-on accessory that you attach to the bottom of the Fit. The sole purpose of this magnetic clip is to add a microUSB charging port to the device - with it on, charging happens just as on any other device, with a standard microUSB cable.

Conclusion

The Samsung Gear Fit price is set at the costly $199 (€199 in Europe), nearly double the price of entry-level fitness trackers, and higher than even the pricey $130 Fitbit Force and $150 Nike FuelBand+. It’s also costlier than the $150 Pebble smartwatch. At the same time, though, such a high price for the Fit is not unjustified - it’s truly a crossover device bringing both a sleek, outworldly design, and a gorgeous, informative AMOLED display that others lack.

After testing it, we can conclude that it’s not as accurate as a dedicated fitness tracker in many aspects, but it’s not way off either. The specific tricks the Gear Fit has, like a heart-rate sensor and coaching mode, are also a bit hit-or-miss. All in all, it’s not the perfect tracker. And at that - nor it is a perfect smartwatch - the screen is not always on, and waking it with motion does not always work. Plus, it does not support any apps that would extend the built-in functionality.

At the same time, though, with all its flaws, the Gear Fit is one of the first devices that gives us a taste of a sci-fi dream we’ve all been dreaming with its curved screen, beautiful display, and a rich notifications system. We’re not there yet, but with the Fit, Samsung is on to something, and we finally feel we’re on the way towards that dream.