Samsung - Gear Sport Smartwatch 43mm - Blue - (2013)

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The vast majority of our reviews come from verified purchases. Reviews from customers may include My Best Buy members, employees, and Tech Insider Network members (as tagged). Select reviewers may receive discounted products, promotional considerations or entries into drawings for honest, helpful reviews.

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Just perfect for me

  • Incentivized
  • Verified Purchaser
  • My Best Buy® Member

  I love this watch. It goes with my Samsung Note 8 perfectly. It's not too big or too small, just perfect for me. There are many apps available. Many great free and purchased faces. It records my activities, provide notifications, much more, and has encouraged me to be more active. It was $50 off during the Thanksgiving week. I enjoy it very much.

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  This review is from Samsung - Gear Sport Smartwatch 43mm

  Posted 8 years ago by Amara

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Great performing smartwatch, plenty of features!

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  • My Best Buy® Member

  This Samsung Gear smartwatch purchase followed the purchase of a Samsung Gear Fit 2 Pro. Make no mistake, I loved the gear fit 2 pro!!... I love this one better. The Fit 2 Pro's smaller rectangular thin screen was the reason to switch to the Gear Sport 42mm. Beautiful display on both and even though the Pro 2 fit perfectly under my boxing gloves, the screen was just a bit too small for all I wanted to use it for so I waited until the Gear Sport was on sale for $279(normally $300 which is about a $100 difference between the two) and upgraded! Boy, was I pleasantly surprised! First of all, in the pictures, the Gear Sport seems like it has a cheaper looking material for the bezel... It does not! It moves beautifully and the screen and apps responds with ease...The only minor issue with the actual build for me is that there's a tiny little gap in the bezel and small pieces of lint and dust from clothes and towels and what not get trapped into. Still trying to find a way to safely(without scrathcing anything!) get something thin enough to clear those pieces out. Again, not a big deal... Especially if you don't have OCD like me. It's just, If your paying close to $300 for this thing that's going to display on your body, I'd like it to be lint ball free! The features here, compared to other non-apple smartwatches or fitbits I've been able to get my hands on is surprising! Still learning everything this bad boy can do. While this does NOT have a speaker(you'll have to pair with wireless headphones), this watch does have the ability to hold and play songs straight from the gear. The watch also has a built in microphone for features we'll get into later! Of course, the Gear Sport comes with your basic fitness watch features that you'd expect at a price point like this; steps, stairs/floors, heart rate, daily and weekly summaries, and various syncable apps like myfitnesspal, a map my run, and many more/etc. The gear does have a built in GPS and having owened both older model samsung watches, other branded android based watches, and various fitbits(Loved my fitbit Charge HR!) in the past, I'm going to go ahead and say The Gear Sport is accurate in these departments, even the heart rate sensor. A good trick to know(which they explain in the manual... Your manual is your best friend people!) for the MOST accurate heart rate reading, place the watch with one finger's gap between the wrist and the hand, and THEN take the reading. Even without doing this, it is still more reliable than most smartwatches at this price point. As far as steps and floors, unless you're actually wearing the strap sensors around your chest, these watches will never be 100% perfect, but you can tell the Gear Sport definitely is strong here. The amoled display is stunning for a smartwatch, what you should expect from a Samsung product. You can recieve notifications for calls and can initiate a call on the watch, but will have to switch over to your phone as again, this device has no speaker. Now, here's where some of that extra money spent comes into play. Not only do you have preset texts sentences ready to fly upon recieving a text, but you can ACTUALLY reply back manually! A couple different ways in fact. You can use a drawing tool to wright out letters to form your sentences, you can use the old style cell phone ABC reply method, or remember that build in microphone? ...You can speak your reply! The gear has S voice so it is a basic assistant. Setting alarms, initiating a call, asking about the weather, etc., but also replying to a text message. Now, on the other hand, here's my second issue with the watch, S voice can be tricky and stubborn. Sometimes it doesn't hear you and sometimes it just plain outright doesn't understand. Always check the spoken text message replies before confirming to send because S voice can have some discrepancies, but as you use it more often, you start to get a rythem with it and figure out what works. Overall, it's pretty neat. The gear does come with Samsung Pay, which I believe only the apple watch and the higher end Fitbits have they're own form of transaction method built in, so that's a huge convenience when a store accepts it(look for the samsung pay symbol at the register and card reader). This watch is also water resistant up to like a hundred something feet which is wonderful to not have to worry about swimming, shower, rain, etc. Just make sure to set the water lock accordingly and properly dry the watch and band afterward. This is something Samsung's higher end model the gear3 is missing. No water resistance, but it does have it's own built in speaker. For me, with it being a fitness watch(and so much more) the water resistance is a no brainer. The thing with any of these watches is that they're ALL expensive, some more than others, so it's just a matter of what features are most important to you that matter. Samsung makes great quality products and that's not different when it comes to their watches. The band is smooth feeling and comfortable... The box comes with two. I use the smaller one because I have a smaller wrist and no hair pulling. For as big as this watch is, you don't really feel it's weight either. Another really cool feature that is purely aesthetic, is the ability to download about 200 pictures onto the watch itself, and then from there you can actually choose a handful of your own downloaded pictures to become your watch display. I have a collage of about 8 different Star Wars pictures that cycle through whenever I pick my hand up to look at the watch, or anytime the screen turns on, it becomes a different picture in my collage. Of course, you can choose from hundreds of beautiful downloadable watch displays for free or for a small fee for with the gear app on your phone. Overall this watch has everything one can hope for regarding the price. Sporty and geared toward fitness/on-the-go, and more fashionable then most(especially with the many customizable faces and the purchase of different style bands) which means you can wear it in a business and professional setting too. Excellent purchase so far!

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  Posted 6 years ago by Steph

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  overall happy with the purchase

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  • Owned for 1 month

  I waited a month before making my review here. I wanted to see how well it works for me before giving my opinion on it. The features I tested are: -samsung pay. Easy to set up and works nicely on any terminal with tap to pay. I've tested this at CVS and Kroger and Sally Beauty so far. Not many local stores to me have tap to pay available unfortunately. -heart rate monitor. seems pretty accurate. I tested it against my fitbit charge 2 hr and they both displayed the same heart rate for every measurement. I like that Samsung health keeps a record of my average daily rates as this was not a feature on fitbit. It also has a flatter (and therefore more comfortable to wear) surface where the hr monitor is. -floors climbed. super inaccurate, I wouldn't remotely rely on this. I live in a 3 story house (garage/basement same level and my bedroom on the technical second floor). I climb a minimum of 2 flights of stairs every work day. my watch registers 1 flight of stairs on a good day and usually it registers none. I wouldn't mind this except I can't set a goal of none. and it's slightly irritating that the samsung fit app thinks I'm not reaching my goals because it requires me to make a goal for something it won't even register me achieving. -step counter. not really as inaccurate as people think. I checked it against my fitbit charge hr 2 and my phone and a generic dollar store pedometer. I did this for a week and for the entire week 3 of the devices were within 500 steps of eachother. The dollar store pedometer was a good 1500 steps behind the other three. II don't expect any pedometer that I don't wear directly on my ankle to be super accurate though so a 500 step margin of error is pretty good for me. -calendar. I don't much like the samsung calendar since I can't sync it across devices as efficiently as google calendar. but my watch was able to use my google calendar on the native calendar app. made things super convenient. -alarms. the watch itself does not have a speaker so it's a vibration alarm. I use it to supplement my phone alarms and it works nicely. it's easy to set an alarm and easy to snooze or dismiss as well. it is easy to confuse the dismiss and snooze though since they are both a swipe from opposite sides of the screen. you have to be awake enough to look at the screen to not accidentally dismiss the alarm when you're intending to snooze only. -music player. not really anything special. it works like a remote control for the samsung music app on your phone. I can't get this to sync to my google play music so it only has the songs I've downloaded into samsung music app. very convenient to use for play/pause and skipping tracks -charging from my samsung phone. does charge if the phone case is off, doesn't register if phone case is on. seems to charge about the same as on the regular charger. -charging from other wireless charging devices. doesn't work 100% of the time. I've found sometimes it will register and others it won't. not a reliable enough charge for me to buy wireless pads for the watch itself. stick with the charger designed for the watch. -battery life. I get about 2.5 days on the battery. I drain it to 20-25% before recharging. I use a lot of features on it. my screen brightness is at 75% and the screen stays on for 15 seconds if I don't tell it to turn off. it will frequently turn on on it's own since I have the bezel set to wake the screen and I bump the bezel on a lot of things (particularly my sleeves). I have auto heart rate set up. I also have bluetooth constantly connected to my phone and notifications for facebook and discord (social media for gamers) constantly going off. I probably could get longer battery life if I used less features but I think I'm good where it's at since my fitbit charge hr had the same battery life and it had WAY less features to play with. -sleep tracking. not sure how well I trust this data. it's pretty similar to what my fitbit. I am somewhat concerned about it registering me watching netflix as sleeping though. I guess I hadn't moved in more than an hour so it registered as sleep? features I did not test: -alti barometer: I opened it but since it's not really relevant data to me I'm not sure how to review this. the app says it has down to the minute readings from the weather channel and gives you data based on your phone's location. -water resistance. I am honestly too terrified of frying my watch to test this. I've seen quite a few reviews where Samsungs response was "you shouldn't have gotten it wet" so I refuse to test it's water resistance. -auto exercise tracking. I'm not a super active person (I got the sport because it's smaller/cheaper than galaxy watch and I have wrists the size of a child's). it did automatically pick up my walking downtown as exercise and calculated a few hours of walking and 5 miles. I haven't done any other types of exercise to see if it tracks those. -s voice. Pretty sure this just goes through the phone so I opt to use "ok google" rather than take the extra steps to navigate through menus to open s voice. Overall pros and cons: pros: easy to learn how to use. bezel is a nice feature (and fun to play with absentmindedly) for scrolling through menus. all the features I bought it for function nicely. tons of watch faces to choose from and complete customization if you're willing to learn how to make a samsung storefront. cons: pretty much my only complaint is with samsung health app and not the watch itself. it's nearly 2020 and samsung health does not have a period tracker STILL. You can track your caffeine intake but not period?? I can't even hook the watch up with any other health apps either to be able to track period and all the other stuff in one place. Samsung please listen to your customers and add this feature that people have been asking for for over a decade (I've looked at forums going back as far as 2008 asking for this feature).

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  Posted 6 years ago by anonymous