Samsung - Gear Sport Smartwatch 43mm - Black

Samsung Gear Sport review In short: this is a really great smartwatch and fitness tracker for those who thought the Samsung Gear S3 was too bulky and find all the other options in the market (Asus, Motorola, Garmin, Fitbit, and Huawei) lacking. My needs: Receive notifications, track steps, track jogging and cycling workouts, sync calendar, send texts, control music, good battery life and be comfortable. Warning, long review ahead. Notifications The Samsung Gear Sport can receive any push notification your phone receives. You can choose which ones you want to turn off and only focus on certain ones. Just because you receive the notification for a certain app on your phone doesn’t mean you need the same app on the watch. Step Tracking From my day of use, tracking of steps seems to be fairly accurate. It will be accurate if I’m walking with my arms to the side, while pushing a stroller or shopping cart, or if my hands are in my pocket. In theory, this should be able to count the number of floors as well but I haven’t had a chance to test yet. From the Gear S3 reviews, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be the most accurate feature here. Track Jogging and Cycling Using the built in GPS, tracking my runs and bike rides is pretty accurate. I like how I can leave my phone at home, start a workout and the GPS kicks in and starts tracking me. Given that I’m a very data centric person, I really appreciate being able to go back on my phone and see all the data points from my workout, including a map of what I’ve done. Obviously initiating the workout will drain the battery quicker but if I keep it under two hours then the Gear Sport will still last me an entire day. Unfortunately, this doesn’t track how many times I pick up my baby who gets heavier by the day, but that’s kind of wishful thinking. Heart Rate The heart rate can be triggered on-demand so you can check your pulse whenever you feel like it. During a workout, it is triggered automatically throughout the workout so you know where you stand. I can’t speak to how accurate it is, but rather than focusing on the accuracy of the number itself, I like to use it in relation to where it was when I started, middle and end. For example, if the watch says my initial BPM is 70 and in the middle of the workout it’s 140, then my workout is being effective. I don’t care if it’s actually 151 instead of 140, but rather my BPM has doubled since my workout started. Sync Calendar Living the corporate life, I’m constantly bombarded with meetings followed by additional meetings. To some degree, these meetings are the vain of my working existence but a necessary evil at times. So I need a way, at any given moment, to very quickly check the meetings coming up in the next few hours. Since I’m this watch with my Samsung S8+ (and by extension the Samsung Calendar App that connects to my Google Calendar), then I can look at all my meetings immediately on the watch. I’ll also get the reminder alerts 15 minutes before my meeting starts which is a life saver. Send Texts (SMS, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, KakaoTalk) Here’s the deal, if I’m getting a text from a friend and I want to respond really quickly with “OK Thanks” or a more lengthy response, I don’t want to take out my phone every single time. It’s much easier to configure a canned response that I can choose from or speak to the watch to respond, have it transcribed and once approved, send the text. This makes it really convenient in so many levels. By the way, this works with all of my messaging apps. NOTE – there is no speaker on this watch so you will not 1. Be able to get audible notifications and 2. Make phone calls. Control Music I’m a Spotify Premium customer, have been for quite some time. So when I heard that this watch was going to let me sync my playlists (up to 4GB) for offline play, that got me excited. But honestly, most of the time I use the Spotify app on the watch to control the music that is playing on my phone, which is being sent to Alexa that is connected to my studio monitors. Even if I’m not listening to music on Spotify and got a podcast instead, no problem, the regular music app works just fine with that. NOTE – there is no speaker on this watch! Battery and Comfort There’s no sense in having all the features in the world if 1. The watch doesn’t last me a day and 2. It’s not comfortable to wear. This is why I’ve kept my Pebble Time for 2.5 years and no other smartwatch in the market could replace it. I’m glad Samsung has figured out that customers want to have our cake and eat it too, meaning we want all the functionality in a form factor that’s very light, thin with a battery that lasts days. Battery wise, I can go 2-3 days on a single charge with medium use. I check notifications when they arrive (about 4-10/hr during the working hours), check for meetings (1-2/hr), control music from time to time and have one (maybe two) 1 hour workout in the 3 days. I do leave the watch face off until I bring it up to look at it, so it’s not always on and saves some battery. Comfort wise, it’s light, slim and the watch face is just the right diameter. I’m 5’10” 175lb and my wrists aren’t particarly small or large. My medium sized hands (whatever that means) can wrap around my wrist so that my middle finger and thumb are touching. If that gives you an idea, at all, of how big my wrists are, I can tell you that this watch is really comfortable and most of the time you don’t notice it. I’ll post pictures compared to my Pebble Time, but they’re equally comfortable even though the Pebble is significantly smaller. So this can do a lot more than what I’ve written about, such as auto tracking workouts, swimming, have tons of other apps installed, change watchfaces, etc. I don’t really use those that often so I can’t comment on it but I’m glad it’s there. Build quality – you’re paying $300 for a watch it better be well built, especially if it’s going to be waterproof up to 50M and used for workouts and swimming. Good news, it is. OK that’s a long enough review. There’s plenty of value for me to highly recommend this to anyone looking for a smartwatch. If all you want is track workouts, perhaps consider a Fitbit or something similar. If you want an inspector gadget mini computer from the future on your wrist, this is it.

The Gear Sport is the perfect combination of Smart and Sporty. Samsung has made improvements over the Gear S3. The most important thing for me is that the heart rate sensor is protruding out of the watch instead of flat. The Gear S3 had very inaccurate readings during high intensity workouts and the protruding heart rate sensor fixes that because it's the closest thing to your wrist at all times. As far as looks, it is the perfect size for a watch in my opinion. I am 5'10 with average sized wrists for a man and it fits great. The size matters to me because, while running, I don't want the watch slipping everywhere because it is too heavy. This actually happened with the Gear S3 because of how big it was. The display is as beautiful as you would expect, and the default watch faces are great. Battery life seems great so far. I charged it to 100 at 2AM last night and it is 8AM so it's been 6 hours. It has gone done 5%. Most of that time, I was sleeping. However, I set the heart rate sensor to always be reading, so it seems to be lasting pretty well. I will update this review after some workouts and GPS use. Connectivity is as you would expect from a 2017 Samsung watch with an Android phone, and even better with a Samsung phone. I use Textra for SMS and I can read my texts and answer them via the Gear Sport by typing or speaking to my watch, which is a great feature. I can take make/take calls from it as well. It is a wonderful thing not to have to pick up your phone to do certain things that your watch can now do. This watch is extremely easy to use thanks to it's practical functionality. Everything is so easy to get to thanks to the rotating bezels. The wake up gesture (moving your wrist like you are looking at your watch) works very quickly and has not failed for me once. I love Samsung pay. Ever since I've used it on my Galaxy S8, I've been saving my points that I can use for gift cards. Although this watch doesn't have MST, most of the places I go have the NFC capability so I will be able to use the Gear Sport to pay for things. It's actually faster for me to use the Gear Sport because I just have to hold one button and there it is. I pick my credit card and hold it up to the reader and I'm done. I am a premium Spotify user and the offline listening is a very convenient feature. I can load songs onto the Gear to listen to while I'm on a run without my phone. I just bring my Bluetooth headphones and take off. Another upgrade from the Gear S3 is the water resistance. I can safely go 50m underwater with this watch and that means I don't have to take it off while swimming. This was an issue with the S3 because it was only IP68, so it was not safe to go swimming with. There are many options for working out and customizing the watch screen while working out. There is even heart rate functionality while swimming. There are, however, many more options on my phone than on the watch, so I need to see if I can get those on my watch. On the S3, there was not a way to do so. Overall, the Gear Sport is an all around wonderful smart watch. The improvements in fitness tracking have brought it closer to the perfect balance of Smart and Sporty. I would highly recommend this. Update 10/30/17: After the first charge to full, this lasted exactly 40 hours so not a full 2 days, but my heart rate was on always, so I'm not surprised. I am a little surprised though that I charged it fully at 9PM last night and it is now 10AM (13 hours later) and it's already at 56%... This is after turning heart rate to every 10 minutes which should have improved it. I will continue to test. Now Samsung Pay. I read that some people had problems with their cards disappearing from the Gear Plug-In for Samsung Pay. I added my cards twice and activated them. They were already there because I have a Galaxy S8+ but needed to be activated. They have disappeared twice now. I have a call into their tech support but it will be useless if they disappear every 24 hours and I will just use my phone instead. Update 11/2/17: I updated this two days ago and for some reason it didn't go through... Battery: I was able to get over 48 hours of battery and still had 25% left. This is with heart rate every 10 minutes and a bunch of notifications. I will attribute this to turning Spotify to "remote" only and not "stream over wifi", unless you want to actually use your watch to stream over wifi. I'm not sure of the point of that if you already have a phone to do so. If you're around wifi, you probably have a phone. Workout: I worked out to test heart rate accuracy. Did 30 minutes of squats and bench press and HR went up to 140 which is normal for me. I then went to the elliptical and chose "elliptical trainer" on my watch. For some reason, the HR would not go above 110 when I know it was around 160 since I tested it on the elliptical and I was going pretty fast. I tightened the watch on my wrist and waited a minute and it seemed to have fixed it. I went another 20 minutes and the watch was within 1BPM of the elliptical most of the time which is much better than my Gear S3 was. After tightening it, it was on par with my Vivoactive HR. To compare, I went a full 30 minutes with my Gear S3 showing 80 BPM when it was about 160-170... Samsung Pay: I have not tried this again since I am sure my cards will be deleted and I haven't had time to add them. I will try to add them today but there is bound to be an issue with the Gear Plug In for Samsung Pay and hopefully it will be addressed soon. Update 11/7/17: Battery Still going strong. I got 60+ hours and still had 15% left. This is with my settings mentioned above. 10 minute heart rates. Includes a workout (more on that below) and lots of notifications. Heart Rate and Wok Out The heart rate sensor did the same thing on the Elliptical workout; however, instead of changing to a different workout as I did before, I just left it and saw if it caught up. It took about 3 minutes but it caught up and was very close to what the elliptical was showing. Verdict: High Intensity workouts will show a lower heart rate at first until it catches up and it takes about 3 minutes. The rest of the workout (20 minutes) was perfect. I did notice on "Other Workout" that the calories are counted much slower for the same heart rate range. For example, 60 calories every 5 minutes was my average for the "Elliptical Trainer" going about 165BPM for 20 minutes. Choosing "Other Workout" gave me about 30 calories per 5 minutes using the same amount of effort. Also, I use "Other Workout" when I'm lifting weights and it seems to be on par with my Vivoactive HR. Not sure what this means but it's info for you. Samsung Pay Here is where I deducted 1 star. If you read above, you would know I called Samsung about my cards disappearing from the Gear Sport and they have not got back to me. The available cards to "activate", which are cards that the system knows you have but you have to verify again, completely disappeared. I added them all manually, which was the first time for manual but the 3rd time altogether. They actually stayed on for about 3 days I think. I even tested it and it didn't work at one NFC reader but did at another. Both were grocery stores. Basically, I have my Galaxy S8+ on me anyway and it's not worth trying the watch when it's hit or miss. On top of all that, I tried it today at a Trader Joe's and all my cards were gone again. For a main feature, it is really pathetic that this kind of thing is happening. I did some reading and it looks like this happens to Gear S3 watches as well. Side Note: I am taking my watch back to BB today since the price came down to 269 and doing a price match after the fact. I suggest you do the same if possible. Cheers.

Just the right size for a woman's wrist, my husband has the S3 and it is big for my wrist, mind you...I have a big wrist and arm. It doesn't have a speaker but it vibrates to let you know when you have a call, for alarms, when you're done with the repetitions for your exercise and more. You can call and send a message using your watch, you can respond with emojis, using a keyboard or write text by hand. The watch tells you your heart rate, steps, stairs/floors you climbed. When you download Samsung health to your phone and after you linked it, the watch automatically transfers daily data/exercises to your phone so you can keep track of your health. There are a lot of exercises you can choose from your watch. I also know that you can connect your phone/watch to your Samsung TV and it will show you the exercises in your TV and also your heart rate and other details, although I have not tried this one yet. You can download different watch faces too on their website. Your watch acts as a remote too, when you are listening to music from your phone, you can use your watch to skip, pause and control it. It is waterproof, you can use it in the pool, while bathing and under saltwater. I just love it. I bought different 20mm watch bands, and it looks really good. I did not include all the specs of the watch in my review, because that you can find on the watch's description on the website, I just wanted to write down my review. My husbands S3 frontier is nice but it is just too big for me, so this one is perfect !!! I will include a picture of the S3 frontier and the Sport. ( I am using this watch face for both of the watches just to show the differences) We also changed the watch bands, they are both not the original.

For starters, I am the type of person that researches something entirely too much before making a purchase. I'm not overly picky, I just have a hard time spending money. So I end up researching products for months before making the purchase. I had looked at getting the Samsung Gear s3 Classic, but the price tag and some of the features kept me from pulling the trigger. I have always been worried that having a smartwatch was a recipe for disaster if it wasn't waterproof. When the Gear Sport came out, it was like a dream come true. The price was more reasonable, it was waterproof up to (if I remember correctly) 163 feet, it had all the great features of the s3 but cut out things I didn't need (like LTE network access). It still took me a little while because I wasn't sure if I wanted to commit to the blue or the dark metal of the Gear Sport. I decided on the dark metal and it looks really nice. The only downside for me was the black sport band that comes with it. I love it for working out, but my skin gets irritated if I wear that band all the time. I ended up ordering a dark metal band that matches the watch metal so that I had a dressier option for work. I am so incredibly please with my purchase. The heart rate monitor is awesome, the different apps and their functionality are phenomenal, the bezel it so satisfying to use, and all the different watch faces are so fun for customization. Overall, this is probably the best electronics purchase I have made in the last few years. Also, looks great on a lady's wrist.

Let me get this out of the way first: I really, really wanted to like this watch. It's a gorgeous device. The hardware is top notch....but the user experience is absolutely garbage. I'm on a non-samsung phone and, despite what store associates told me, the watch experience is less than acceptable. I get text and email notifications, but that's it. The email and messages app that comes with the phone is completely inaccessible. When you pair your device, those two apps simply vanish from the app drawer. Being those are among the most important apps in a smart watch, Samsung is clearly just holding your device hostage to force you into buying their phone. It's underhanded. I can reply to texts from the notification window, but the watch holds zero record of the conversation, again, on non-samsung phones. Tried it on the OnePlus 5, pixel 2 and the new lg. And the app store is an even bigger rip off. If you are buying this because of Samsung's boast of "thousands of apps" be warned. Sure, there's a lot of apps, but a large majority of them don't even work....and you have to pay for them with no hope of a refund. When I say they don't work, I mean they don't do anything at all. I've yet to run across a single 3rd party app that doesn't have a very long list of "misleading" or "doesn't work" comments. I've tried several myself and the commenters are right. 90% of the apps are rip off garbage. Here's the kicker: several of these non functional apps are on the editors top pick list. Samsung picked those apps to be among the best and they don't even work.....and Samsung only has like 3 or so devices to support. Garbage. Then there is Svoice which I can't even review because I only ever got it to work once, every other time I would get an error message. Svoice is useless. Honestly my old Fitbit blaze was more reliable than this one....and it's BARELY a smart watch. Limited functionality, holding essential apps hostage for non Samsung phone users and paid apps that do absolutely nothing except take your money. Classic Samsung. Make beautiful hardware and then screw you on the software side. This will be my last Samsung device. Apple holds their devices hostage too, but at least the apps they offer actually work.

I purchased the Gear Sport Smartwatch to replace a Gear Fit2 Pro due to poor battery life with the Fit2. I needed a device that could last overnight to monitor my sleep and be ready for my morning workout. Thankfully, the Gear Sport has more than enough battery for the task. Overall the Gear Sport does everything it is designed to do without much fuss. The only two issues I had was adding a credit card for Samsung Pay and loading music. Adding a credit card seems to be a common problem based on the number of Google responses I found when looking for help. The solution was simple enough, needed to clear the Samsung Pay app’s cache and reset the smartwatch. The problem I encountered with loading music was due to adding too many play lists at the same time. The lists and tracks were scrambled. Easy solution is to add one playlist at a time. Loading is easy thanks to the Samsung music app. It was able to import my play lists from Media Monkey without any prompting. The most pleasant feature, which is unique to me, is S Voice working when using Android Auto. I have a hideaway deck, no steering wheel controls and no cabin mic, so when the deck is retracted I have no interface. Also, obviously, without a cabin mic and can’t make phone calls. Just for because, I wanted to see if S Voice would work. It not only worked with Android Auto I was also able to use the mic on the watch to make phone calls. Despite the two hiccups I had with loading music and adding a credit card, I am more than impressed with the functionality of the Gear Sport Smartwatch.

Purchased this after owning an apple watch for two years, so comparing the two is easy. I have the blue Samsung Gear Sport watch. Loved it so much that I bought one for my husband for Christmas. Pros: -Fitness/Exercise options are great. I can even choose Yoga. So many options for recording my exercises. - Ease of use, once set up - Battery Life - At least 2 days at average use and watch face not on all the time. -Water resistance (tested in my shower) -Can be used with iphones Cons -NO SPEAKER (Cannot receive phone calls through the watch without having bluetooth headphones - Storage space is too small. They should make them 10 Gigs minimum in all phones. After Apple destroyed my 6S Plus with the 11 upgrade, I went back to Android. The Android I chose was a Note 4 so it is NOT up to the most recent Android Version. Therefore my microphone option is quirky. So cannot review that. Otherwise, this watch works as described. While I cannot use my Apple Watch (which I LOVED) with Android, I can use the Samsung Gear Watch with an iphone. My husband uses his with his iphone. The fitness options are better than the apple. Having to scroll or turn the bezel to access the apps is kind of a pain on the Gear BUT you can organize them to make access to your most frequently used apps, so that makes it faster to get to what you want. There are interactive watch faces so you can get to what you want with a touch of the finger. More choices for watch faces than apple watch too. Processor is fast enough. Haven't used the bluetooth so not sure if it is problem free. Overall, very pleased! Love the water resistance. I am brutal on watches. Have had it since December and wear it about 5 days out of 7 per week and haven't damaged it at all.

Its been 3 months since I upgraded from my gear fit 2 to the Gear Sport and its been great. I'm an avid daily runner that switches between casual street running and half marathons and this is a must have. This pairs well with s health (as it should) and provides a great deal of analytics on my runs including but not limited to Heart rate, cadence, and average mile time. For someone my size (6'2") the weight and size is perfect. Its hefty enough to know its there but not too much to be considered intrusive ...however ..it does take a few days of wearing to become completely used to wearing this especially upgrading from something smaller. As a watch there is no foreseeable shortcoming.It tells the time, displays texts, and is snappy with responses. Its rotational sensors are sensitive enough to know when I turn my wrist to view the time the first time everytime (gear fit 2 often wouldn't recognize this). Another big plus is that the battery life is LONG and I can go a full day or 2 on a single charge. The charger is simple and effective. Toss it on for 20 minutes and you should be aalmost refully recharged for the next day or 2. The apps offered aren't terrible but there could be more to them. There isn't a speaker for music or phone calls which isn't a deal breaker but would be a nice consideration in future iterations.