Samsung Gear Fit Curved Screen Wearable Tech Review. The Gear Fit with curved AMOLED screen is cool looking, that’s for certain. The design is lightweight and comfortable for Fitness or activity tracking; able to track your steps, monitor sleep patterns, displays notifications from your phone for you to conveniently glance at and has a built-in heart rate sensor and is IP67 dust and water resistant just like the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo smartwatches.
Technical Specs
The Gear Fit features a 1.83 inch curved AMOLED touchscreen display at 432 x 128 at 245 PPI resolution. There is a single button acts both as a power button and a home button. The lightweight Gear Fit comes in at a slim and trim 23x57x12mm. A 1GHz dual-core processor with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of onboard storage space with the 210mAh battery brings the grand total weight to only 27g. Includes an Accelerometer, Gyro and Heart Rate sensors. The Fit has it’s own charging cradle as well, so you’ll need to keep it handy when wearing it full time.
Fit
The Gear Fit works well on the wrist. The slimmed shape allows for greater range of movement so you might notice it less wearing it while exercising or tracking. The unit can also be used 24/7 so fit and comfort are key.
The rubber wristband fastens to your wrist with a push of the clasp area inserting the two nibs into the holes. The wrap system works fine, though it seems like it might fall off in certain snag type situations but it’s also easy to put on with one hand and allows to shed some weight with the claspless system. You can also swap bands or use it without in your pocket if you choose to.
Features and Usage
It’s super easy to operate. You swipe left or right to get the next 3 icons and there’s an added back button to make it easier on you. You can’t make or receive calls on the Gear Fit like you can on the Galaxy Gear, Gear 2 or Gear 2 Neo but you can screen your calls and reject the call or reject it and send along an automated text message from your wrist.
Check out our Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo smartwatch Review
The Gear Fit features a Pedometer, Exercise, Heart Rate monitor, Sleep Tracker and Find my Device, as well as Media controller, Notifications, Stopwatch and Timer. The pedometer and sleep tracker both require you to manually start them. So if you happen to fall asleep without knowing exactly when you will do so, this feature might be a little cumbersome to use. You can set the Gear Fit to sync up with your Shealth app on your Galaxy S5 or GS5 Active on a schedule at every 3 hours or a couple times a day. The Pedometer accuracy has also been modified to work a bit better.
Software version R35OXXUOBNES adds in a Pause and Resume feature for your pedometer to allow you can take a break and keep your step count accurate.
User Interface Experience
Using the Gear Fit is a little less polished than the look of the device. You are able to rotate the orientation vertically or horizontally. Trying to use the Gear Fit in horizontal view is awkward and I prefer not to use it. Though the information is layout better, you have to try and align your head to your wrist in an odd way that just doesn’t feel natural or comfortable.
I really love the vertical view on the Gear Fit but reading email notifications in vertical view is a challenge in it’s own respect. The text displays in such a garble that it makes quickly looking at them and understanding them an issue. There aren’t enough layout choices for vertical view for a clock with date and notifications. The idea is to be able to quickly glance at notifications on your wrist which becomes a bit more difficult on the Gear Fit. Clearly there needs to be some more options on font sizes. The font sizes are locked into the layout so you have but to choose from what’s available. Adding the ability to tweak your own font sizes and layout would be a nice addition.
Results
While the system is extremely intuitive and easy to use and runs great but the device seems a bit empty. The Heart Rate monitor is no more accurate than on the Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo, Galaxy S5 or Galaxy S5 Active. The pedometer seems to record better results under the newer firmware update. In our testing the Gear Fit is able to keep within 2-5 steps of accuracy comparing to our manual counts. When we ran the Shealth Pedometer simultaneously and the Gear Fit and GS5 only managed to stray about 5 steps over a 500 step count. Your experience may vary and it’s not perfect but the accuracy has been noticeably fine tuned a bit and works much better than at launch.
The hardware is there, the design is passionate and sleek, the development and execution of the software is however lacking with sparse apps but the bugs are getting massaged out. I would have preferred to see a better performing Gear Fit and Gear 2 with a large curved screen and drop the Gear Neo from the line. Hopefully the next firmware updates to come will bring even better fine tuning and added functionality and apps.
The price of the Gear Fit has dropped to $150 down from $200 and coming firmware updates will hopefully take care of some accuracy and layout issues soon but it’s still very sleek. The relayed Notifications are a great convenience and the Find my Device feature is paramount for someone who loses their phone often. The Gear Fit is super light, very comfortable, features a beautiful curved AMOLED screen and activity tracking services are improved. If you’re looking for a cool looking, slim lightweight extension of your phone without the bulk along, the Gear Fit might be something to consider.
Available for $150 in Black, Grey, Green, Red, Orange from
www.samsung.com/us/mobile
