First Thoughts on the Galaxy Watch

Well I have used the Samsung Galaxy watch 2 days now while walking through the parks at Walt Disney World and I must say for the most part I am impressed. With the watch comfortably on your wrist you can set it up to lightly vibrate for email and text messages. As opposed to looking at your phone constantly you can see the headline of each message and if you want to read the content simply click the message and the content is right there for you on your watch. You can also browse your email and text messages by swiping side to side on a message. Facebook notifications also arrive on your watch but you cannot read them here but you can tell the watch to open them on your phone so when you look at the phone he Facebook message is already displayed.

Talking on the phone, which I did once can be a little difficult in a busy and crowded place like Disney a world because it is of course using the speaker and microphone on the watch.  It was fun to try but became annoying when my son continued to say "you are breaking up!"   In a quiter place, like your car which I did try before leaving on my trip worked just fine.

The watch also has some out of the box apps like "Pedometer" which can track your walking through the day and then uplink a health report to your Galaxy phone. This has reported what I already knew - you really better be prepared to walk ALOT at Disney World.  There are other apps that come so the watch and you can download others like Zite but I will talk more about them in a later post.

I am also impressed with the battery on this little guy. I used it all day yesterday and forgot to charge it overnight. When I noticed this in the morning I panicked until I saw that it still had 77% remaining! The watch comes with a nice docking cradle which the wire had lodged loose somehow when I was setting things up in our room.  Another nice side effect of this watch is that it actually improves the battery life of your smartphone because you tend to look at it much less.

The other observation that I found that just like your phone or tablet the screen of the watch can become difficult to impossible to read when the sun is directly overhead. 

If you have not been using a "old school" watch it will probably take a little time to get accustomed to this, especially because the band is a little big, probably because of the camera but I quickly adjusted to it.

So far this watch has been better then I expected and I can see it becoming a daily part of the work and home experience. I will continue using it and write a full review after our Disney vacation.

Part 2 - Pedometer & Smartphone Freedom (October 23, 2013)













Pedometer
After the original review I of course went out to Disney's Hollywood Studios for the day where I turned on the Pedometer App. The Pedometer app counts your steps and syncs the data to your smartphone. The app works great however I left it on all day and only realized this when I was waiting for Fantasmic to start at about 7:30pm when the watch displayed a "low battery warning". If you recall the previous day I had used the watch the same amount of time and still had 77% battery life at the end of the night. Therefore I would recommend only using this app when you are walking or running.

Smartphone Freedom
The best feature of this smartwatch to me has been what I have been calling "smartphone freedom". Walking through the park I can check out email messages and text messages as well as the time (again, how quaint) without reaching for my smartphone. This saves time and battery life your phone.

Part 3 - Wearable Comfort and a Camera to Boot (October 25, 2013)

I think that one of the challenges for smart watches is actually going to be that many people have simply stopped wearing watches as they became more tied to first, their mobile phones and finally to their smartphones. After all who needed a watch when your phone could tell you the time as well as everything else? In fact it actually took me a couple of days to get accustomed to wearing a "watch" again but eventually I got used to it. The band on the Galaxy watch is larger then it probably needs to be but that it because Samsung stuck a camera (pictured above) on the wrist band. It really does not look that bad and most people probably wont even notice that you are sporting a small mobile camera. If you set up Google+ with their 15gb of free storage the pictures will upload to your smartphone and Google account. You can even take short 15 second videos with the camera.

I snapped the above to photos with my watch while standing in the queue line for the Space Shuttle Atlantis simulator at Kennedy Space Center. Not bad for such a small camera.

You can also snap a series of photos with the watch to create an animated gif (above) and below is a 15 second video I recorded while waiting to become an astronaut at KSC.

The camera is just under 2mp so you are not going to capture great photos here, but if your camera or smartphone are not available this is a good option, and a little fun as well. I kinda felt like a private eye using the camera!


The Galaxy Gear Future

This is really a good first attempt at an actually usable smart watch. The freedom of checking email, text messages and even getting notifications from Facebook with a little handy dandy camera does provide a sense of "smartphone freedom".

This smartwatch is being expanded t other Galaxy watches as we speak so hopefully Samsung will find success here and continue building on what they started here.