Samsung showed off the Galaxy Gear this week at IFA in Berlin, and Ive been reading through the spec sheet for about twenty minutes now trying to figure out who this thing is actually for.
Its a smartwatch. $299.99. It only talks to a Galaxy Note 3 right now (Samsung says more of their phones will get support later, sure). It's got a 1.9 megapixel camera built into the wrist strap, which is a genuinely strange place to put a camera, and the battery is rated at 25 hours.
Twenty five hours. Let that sit for a second. That means youre charging this watch every single night, like a phone, except its also supposed to be a watch, and a watch is the one device in your life youre not supposed to have to think about. Ive worn the same $40 Casio for something like six years and I honestly dont remember the last time I changed the battery in it. Thats kind of the whole point of a watch.
I backed the Pebble on Kickstarter back in April 2012 (yes, I was one of those people, no I dont regret it) and the thing that actually sold me wasnt the apps, it was that Pebble promised something like a week of battery life off an e-paper screen. A week you can forget about. Twenty five hours is something you have to manage, plan around, remember before bed.
The lock-in bugs me more than the battery
The bigger issue for me isnt even the charging, its that Samsung built this thing to only work with one phone that most people dont own yet. If you dont have a Note 3, which is itself a huge 5.7 inch phone I held at a Best Buy display table last week and could barely fit in my jacket pocket, the Gear is a $299 paperweight with a camera in it. Thats not really a smartwatch ecosystem, thats an accessory bolted to one specific phone.
Compare that to what Pebble did, which was just be a Bluetooth watch that talks to basically any iPhone or Android device you already own. Lower bar for entry, way more useful to way more people.
I get why Samsung is doing it this way, honestly. They want you buying the phone AND the watch together, and IFA is their big yearly stage to make noise before Apple does whatever Apple is going to do later this month (everyone assumes theres an iPhone event coming, we'll see soon enough). Locking two new devices together is a blunt but effective way to move more Note 3 units off shelves.
As a product for an actual human wrist, though, I dont buy it yet. The notification stuff sounds genuinely fine, being able to glance at who's calling without digging your phone out of a bag is a real convenience, Ill give them that much credit. And the camera, dumb placement aside, means you can grab a photo without fumbling for your phone, which matters if youve ever tried to catch something quick happening right in front of you.
But 25 hours of battery on a device thats supposed to replace the one thing on your body you never have to think about? Thats the part that doesnt work for me. My boring analog watch has never once died on me mid-meeting and left me staring at a blank face. Ill start believing in smartwatches when one of them can say the same.
Samsungs press language is already calling this the start of a new category, and maybe it will be, eventually, once someone solves the battery problem and the single-phone problem at the same time. That version will be worth owning. This one, at $299.99, feels like it shipped a year or two before the hardware underneath it was ready. Im curious what the reviews look like once people have worn one for a full week instead of a few minutes at a trade show demo table, because demo tables lie about battery life constantly, every single time.
For now my hypothetical Note 3 money is staying in my pocket. Along with my dumb Casio, which, again, I havent charged once since somewhere around 2010.