[Samsung Gear 2 Neo] andur:
The hard is good, the firmware it's like a nightmare

Hi there, i'm also a new user for the gear 2 neo. First i'm an spaniard so beg for your forgiveness if my english is not good.

Now i'd like to talk about the watch after 2 week of use.

First, the watch. Nothing to complain here, i think it is a nice piece of hardware. The only think i don't like is that is not water resistant, IP 5/6 it is not the same as water resistant. Some gadgets are proven to leak water inside although they are "splash resistant". Battery life is good es long as you don't install apps from the store, and the screen is very vivid and crisp, even in the sunlight.

I like that the screen stays off until i turn my wrist, i don't like people around seen my facebook messages or notification in the screen. The sound is ok, loud enough to work in the street. It worked at once with my n7100 (note 2) with stock rom (4.3)

So i could say, Samsung did good with this gadget.

However, I'm very disappointed with the software for this watch. Not only the Samsung App Store for the watch, but also for the Firmware and the Samsung Apps like Fitness with Gear.

The firmware is not good at the point that all the apps running in the watch are HTML5 + Javascript. The apps run in a chrome-like headless browser emulating a full screen app. That means that develop for the watch should be simple enough, but also there is some problems associated to Javascript.

The watch is actually multitask, and you may access to the apps in memory holding two fingers at the screen for a couple of second. That is good, but with Javascript and background tasking could suck up all the battery if the app is not good. And the Gear App Store is full of not working/not optimized Apps. I think the only good ones is the simple calc somebody from this forum uploaded to samsung and other one that work like a flashlight.

Fitness with gear is just a bad app for sports. It does not give you useful information, simply because it does not provide you with the full stats for the workouts. For example in a run you could see you average heart rate but not the detail. In dream mode only uses the accelerometer, although the watch could use the heartrate monitor to take a sample from time to time so it could get much more detailed information, but it does not. The app in the phone first has to send the information to Samsung server and then after 15 min. or so you can see the data in the app instead doing it on the spot. Also could put all the information in a cohesive way analysing all the data from the pedometer, heart rate and rest of the sensors in the watch and phone to show a nice piece of information, same as other health trackers do (like fitbit for example). But it does not and in this watch is that's a crime.

The gallery in the watch does not work. You only can upload one image for the watch face, and there is no way to upload more images.

Although you could answer SMS with S voice/templates you can not do that with the email. There is a button to share your data from your workouts in social networks but it is not active.

S voice is strange. You can do some things but not others related to the first. For example, you can create alarms but can not deactivate or delete them.

The watch Alarm depends completely from the phone. I like that the alarms are synchronized, but come on, the watch should be able to be independent from the phone for that the same way as does for the countdown app.

The app for the remote control can only store 1 tv. What do i do if i have more than one?

I think Samsung should work harder in improving the firmware, it's a shame that in a gadget with so much potential they are already talking about the "next health wearable" that means forget updates for the watch.