Smart phones have become a very mature market, especially in the past decade, with the birth of the iPhone, this industry has developed rapidly. However, compared with smart phones, smart phones are just an emerging industry in its infancy, and Samsung is one of the first manufacturers to enter this market. Since 2013, Samsung has launched its own smart watch Gear series, and recently the Gear series has welcomed its latest product, Gear S2.
Appearance design
First of all, from the perspective of appearance design, the Gear S2 is definitely one of Samsung's smartwatches with the highest appearance value. The early Gear series watches look bulky and bulky, and their wear design is not very reasonable. The Gear S2 does not seem to have this problem. The round dial design and the lack of black edges like Moto 360's make the Gear S2 kill many smart watches designed with "electrician thinking".
In terms of size, the Gear S2 provides two options, 42mm and 50mm. Generally, if the wrist is not very small, a 42mm watch will not appear particularly large on the hand. As for the 50mm version, I think if you are not a strong man, you'd better not try it. As for the choice of watchband materials, the Gear S2 and other smart watches that can replace the watchband are the same. Samsung officially provides three choices: plastic watchband, leather watchband and stainless steel watchband. The leather strap will cost $50 more than the plastic strap version. But believe me, the texture of the leather strap is not a little better than that of the plastic strap. Of course, you can also change the strap of the Gear S2 by yourself, because the Gear S2 uses the same 20mm strap as an ordinary watch.
System interaction
Different from other manufacturers using Android Wear system, Samsung has its own smart watch system - Tizen. Although this system is jointly developed by several manufacturers and organizations in name, only Samsung is still spending money to develop and improve it. This system is not only used by Samsung in wearable devices, but also in smart phones and Internet of Things homes.
Why doesn't Samsung use Android Wear? One of the important reasons is that Android Wear is not as open as the Android platform. Strictly speaking, Android Wear is more like an ecosystem strictly controlled by Google, and manufacturers are not allowed to customize it at will. Tizen is basically Samsung's private property, which Samsung can modify and customize according to its own wishes. However, the lack of third-party application support for the Gear S2 equipped with the Tizen system has become the biggest problem in its system.
However, despite the lack of third-party application support, Gear S2 has excellent performance in system interaction. Gear S2 allows you to operate not only through the touch screen, but also by rotating the bezel. This is a function that all previous smart watches do not have. The feedback is very clear through the operation mode of rotating the bezel. Every turn will have a "tick" sound. This operation experience is more reasonable and convenient than the way Apple watch rotates the digital watch crown. This operation of rotating the bezel can also make the user more quickly and accurately locate when selecting text or menu. This is really a good innovation on the small screen of a smart watch.
Another thing I have to mention is that the built-in voice control of Gear S2 wakes up very slowly. Compared with Android Wear's Google Now and Apple's Siri, Samsung's S Voice is almost nothing. For a device controlled mainly by voice, the performance of Gear S2 is not satisfactory.
Hardware support
The Gear S2 has a circular 1.2 inch screen with a resolution of 360 * 360, which is higher than the Apple Watch. The screen material is AMOLED screen, and AMOLED also performs better than LCD in terms of power consumption. In terms of configuration, Gear S2 has a 1GHz dual core Exynos processor, 512MB running memory, 4GB internal storage space, and built-in gyroscope, barometer, heart rate sensor, accelerator and other sensors, which can comprehensively detect various data.
Gear S also has a built-in NFC chip, which supports Samsung Pay's NFC payment. It is a pity that it does not support the same analog magnetic stripe bank card payment as Galaxy S6. In terms of protection level, the waterproof ability of Gear S2 has reached the level of IP68, which means that this smart watch has no pressure when used at a depth of 1 meter underwater, and the maximum can even reach 3 meters.
Unlike Samsung's Galaxy series phones, Gear 2 can be adapted to any Android 4.4 system version and phones with running memory of more than 1.5GB. It is also rumored that Samsung will add support for iOS platform in the future. At present, Android Wear already supports iOS platform.
In terms of the endurance performance, although the Gear S2 has only 250 mA battery capacity, Samsung's optimization of the Tizen system is good. Basically, under normal use, there is no problem for one day. If you use it lightly, the endurance can even reach two to three days.
Gear S2 is divided into three versions, the standard version with silver tape, the standard version with 3G data (can answer and make calls independently) and the classic version with black belt.
Summary
The Gear S2 is undoubtedly the best smart watch Samsung can produce at present. It has a good appearance design, as well as a sufficient aspect and innovative interaction mode. Its endurance performance is also better than most smart watches on the market at present. The hardware support for watches is also very good. However, the immaturity of the Tizen system and the weakness of Samsung's voice technology have hindered the overall performance of Gear S2. If Samsung can attract more developers to develop more third-party applications for Gear S2 and quickly solve the voice problem of S Voice, Gear S2 is very competitive in the immature smart watch market at present, and the starting price of $250 is reasonable. At present, Gear S2 has not yet been listed in the Chinese market, but Gaer S2 does not have the system issues that need to be considered when entering the Chinese market like Android Wear, so it is only a matter of time before it is released in China.
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