The dream of a fully standalone wrist gadget that can make phone calls, stay connected and even help you be sounds good, at least on paper. To own a smartwatch usually means having it be perma-paired to a phone in your pocket: it ends up being, largely, a phone accessory. That's starting to change. A few bold watches are trying to break away and be their own devices, with their own phone service to boot.
The Samsung Gear S is one of those. This is Samsung's sixth smartwatch in a little over a year, but it has one big difference: it gets its own cell service and data. It even has its own SIM-card slot. It's a watch that's also a phone.
Someday soon, smartwatches might be devices that work totally on their own, no phone necessary: as a connected Web browser, a music player, a fitness device. But the Samsung Gear S is not exactly that magic watch. Yes, it can do a surprising number of things. But it still needs a Samsung phone to make most features work. It runs Samsung's limited Tizen software and dedicated Gear apps, closing it off from the richer ecosystem of Google's Android Wear. And it requires a connected data plan to even use it as a cellular device.
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| SAMSUNG GEAR S |
For some of my time with the Gear S, I paired it with a Samsung phone. But for most of the time, I tried using it on its own, as a true independent smartwatch. Well, I should say "independent," because if you're going to use a Gear S, you're still best off bringing a phone along.
The Gear S has its own speakers and microphone. It vibrates when you get messages or an alarm goes off. It's studded with sensors: accelerometer, gyroscope and compass, optical heart rate, ambient light for screen brightness, UV and barometer. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1 and 3G cellular. It's got 4GB of storage, 512MB of RAM and a dual-core processor. And it weighs 66 grams (2.3 ounces). But its display is the most impressive part...and, to some degree, the most alienating.The rubbery-plastic sport-type band it comes with can pop out around the Gear S central unit and be replaced with another band accessory. It snaps on like previous Gear watches: an adjustable watch band with a clip, it sizes and fits easily.The watch is IP67-rated water-resistant, which means you can get it wet, but you're not meant to shower or swim with it. It's about the same story as Samsung's previous Gear watches.
The Gear S has a 2-inch 480x360-pixel AMOLED display, a bigger screen and a larger pixel count than other Android Wear smartwatches and previous Samsung Gears. It's longer, almost feeling like a mini-phone in portrait mode.
You need to pay for a phone/data package to use the Gear S standalone features, but they are fun to play with. The Gear S packs Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi and multiband cellular: 3G, but not 4G LTE. You can keep the Gear S perpetually paired with your Samsung phone and use it as a connected accessory, like Android Wear, or you can completely decouple and use the Gear S with nothing else at all.
