Samsung Gear Fit Review

GearFit003
The Gear Fit is a superbly designed wearable fitness band and watch, but it is somewhat limited by price and app issues.

Samsung Gear Fit: On the plus side

Smartwatches are one of those categories that, outside the very geeky, still sit in the “waiting to go mainstream” space. They’re undoubtedly a luxury, and for a lot of people they’re left wondering if it’s worth dropping a few hundred bucks on what are generally limited notification devices.
Fitness bands, on the other hand, are an area of wearable technology that’s solidly taken off, with bands from manufacturers such as Fitbit and Jawbone selling in high volumes. Samsung’s latest smart wearable, the Gear Fit, sits in the middle of both categories, and as a result, has a lot of appeal by borrowing from both categories.

You don't get the bulk of a smart watch, or the slender style of a straight fitness band. But it does look nice.
You don’t get the bulk of a smart watch, or the slender style of a straight fitness band. But it does look nice.

As a fitness band, it’s on the chunkier side, but that allows it to sport a curved 1.84 inch Super AMOLED touchscreen display in full colour, giving it the capabilities not only as a fitness band but also as a smartwatch. You don’t get the bulk of a smartwatch, but you do get most of the feature set.
The end result is a very comfortable device to wear. My standard benchmark for any bit of wearable technology is that it should be comfortable enough to wear that I forget that I’m actually wearing it. That’s a test that the Samsung Gear Fit passed with flying colours.
The Samsung Gear Fit’s pedometer is in my estimation on the overly generous side when it comes to assessing steps. Over an average day with the Samsung Gear Fit and a Jawbone UP24 on the same wrist, the Gear Fit tracked more than 1,500 more steps than the Jawbone UP24 did. Without deliberately counting every step over a day, which is after all what a pedometer’s meant to do for you, it’s difficult to say which was overall more accurate, but as I’ve noted before, the real utility in this kind of device is in giving you aggregate scores over time so you can track your ongoing activity. Still, if you’re a stickler for absolute scores, it could be problematic.
Like a lot of the rest of Samsung’s 2014 range, the Samsung Gear Fit also incorporates a heart rate monitor as well as a pedometer into its fitness tracking arsenal. There’s plenty of online reports that suggest that it’s not quite as accurate as a full medical grade sensor, and I’m not surprised by that at all. As with the Samsung Galaxy S5, it’s best used as an indicative measure of heart rate rather than a fullscale medical testing tool. It does at least have the advantage that in being worn, it’s always ready to go if you need to check your heart rate, although you’ll have to keep still while testing it.
Next page: Samsung Gear Fit: On the minus side

2 thoughts on “Samsung Gear Fit Review”

  1. It is a shame that the ads make this site look so crap on an iPhone.
    Content fills the left half of the screen due to ads pushing out the right margin.

    1. Erk… that should NOT be happening. Thanks for bringing that to my attention — should now be fixed.

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