[Samsung Gear 2] cryptiq:
Initial thoughts.

- Vibration is way too weak. It's very easy to miss notifications in a noisy environment. I seldom hear my phone or feel it vibrate if I'm walking around where there's lots of noise, ie cafeteria, mall, party, etc. I figured having a smartwatch that vibrates would help reduce the amount of missed notifications but it doesn't seem to be much of an improvement. For me, this was the most important feature of the watch so I'm disappointed because the Gear 2 doesn't meet my needs.

- I don't like having to change the ringer volume on my phone and my Gear 2. It would be nice to have an option to enable on the watch so that when your phone goes to silenced or vibrate only, the watch does the same. And then when you turn the ringer up on your phone, the watch should be able to do the same.

- Not sure if this is a limitation of the Gear 2 vs. my phone, but there needs to be a way to train or have S Voice learn your voice. If my hands are tied up and I want to call my buddy Shawn from my watch instead of pulling out my phone, I can't do it because S voice says "cannot find Sean in your address book." Why can't I teach it to know that when I say Shawn that it recognizes the name Shawn instead of just Sean. Now if I had a friend that spelled their name Sean, I wouldn't mind having to say "Call [seen]" to compensate, but I don't know any other way to say "Shawn" and have the phone know I'm saying Shawn, not Sean.

- Needs a home screen lock. My 1-year-old is fascinated with my Gear 2 and he's always pressing the button and re-arranging my screens when I'm pushing him around in a shopping cart or holding him. And I've managed to really hose up my layout myself when wrestling with a new band I was installing. I realize I can setup a PIN lock, but I don't want to enter a PIN every time i need to access my phone. I'd like to be able to setup my home screens, then lock them in place so they're not accidentally moved around.

- Outdoor mode shouldn't be limited to 5 minutes. The last thing I want to do when I'm outdoors is go find an area in the shade to adjust my brightness again so I can see the display. I realize the intent here was probably for saving the battery...but if I wanted to do that I would disable the wake-up gesture.

- For me, the battery life is adequate. I don't sleep with a watch on, I charge my phone every night, so I don't mind charging my watch every night even tho I could easily go 2 days on a single charge.

- I'm happy with the included set of apps even though others have pointed out there's a very limited number of apps available.

- I wish the home button wasn't so intrusive. The placement on the face of the watch makes it easy to get to (especially for a 1-year-old) but I would rather see it on the side of the watch so it didn't stand out so much. It's almost like they did it to say "hey, in case you didn't think it was geeky/nerdy to wear a smart watch, I'm gonna put this button on the face to make sure nobody misses how much of a geek you are." I wanted a watch that resembled a watch and included techy features...but I feel like I ended up with the next generation calculator watch. This wasn't a deal breaker for me though, just nit-picking.

For now, I'm on the fence as to whether or not I'll keep it. I feel like it doesn't exactly meet my needs so I'm tempted to return it and wait for the next best thing....or try out a Pebble since others have mentioned it has stronger vibration. But, I hate returning new technology especially when it's in such short supply...it makes me feel guilty and ungrateful. So I'll probably end up keeping it but ultimately I'm dissatisfied.