[Samsung Gear S] jmattick:
First day aboard and this is what I have to say.

I connected it to my Note 3 on a whim. Easy peasy, despite the fact it has no SIM card in it or the Note 3. Just used wifi and bluetooth and set everything up. And I was happy.

Then it came to all the ways to try to pair it with non-Samsung phones. And I tried and I tried every method in this thread, combinations of this thread, backed up every Samsung app on my Note 3 with Titanium Backup and restored them there. Nothing. I can get them to pair up via Bluetooth but I cannot get Gear Manager to pick it up and start working. I tried all sorts of different file edits with root on the new device, and I rooted the Gear S. But still nothing yet.

And what sucks is that the Posh Mobile Titan Max HD e600 is newish, but that's not saying much considering that I can't find much on the e500 and it's been out quite a bit longer. I want to play with different OS's, seeing if there is something in their build that is holding me up, but I fear bricking my phone because while I *think* the only difference between the e500 and the e600 is the screen size, I don't want to risk making myself a nice paperweight.

There is one leading reason why I say that. I moved files around, did a factory reset/dalvik cache wipe. On pops the phone with the files in the system folders still there... I scratch my head, put the phone into bootloader mode and do a wipe from there. Still the files are there...

Posh doesn't have ANYTHING on their website as far as support. There are no USB drivers, no recovery builds. Nothing. Just says if you encounter problems to take the phone back to the retailer you purchased it from for help, and gives you the method of bootloader wipes.

I'm fairly certain I'm back to normal and got rid of all the Samsung apps I had stuck in root directories, by backtracking every install process and just deleting if I came across a filename.

So, having said all that, here is what I know.

1. I got the Gear S working with my old Note 3 (which was a VZW, but then I unlocked it and used it on T-Mobile) running JasmineROM, a TouchWiz rom that we VZW Note 3 carriers are stuck with. I then went through and backed up every file that was related to Samsung and account integration on the Note 3, and slowly tried to restore them on the Posh Mobile. I'd get a few apps restored and then I'd get something that wouldn't and then Titanium Backup would hang. I restart and keep track of which files made it hang, removing them and then restoring a few more until the next time that it wouldn't like an app, and then it would hang again, which required a battery pull and to continue. In the coming days I plan on taking the same files that made the device hang and putting them in their appropriate root folders and then retrying. I'm glad I know ADB and I'll make a backup before I start trying to essentially turn a POSH Mobile into a Samsung device.

2. No methods I've read have worked thus far. I went through the thread, doing things precisely how they were posted, then mixing it up and trying something different and the only time I even got close was with REALLY old Gear Manager and it would update itself (not ask, it would say that I could do a mandatory update or cancel, and cancelling closed the app). I fear I have a few bugs I need to work out with the new phone anyway that might be contributing to the issue, and they are this; the device comes with 8GB onboard space and I have a 64gb microSD card in the slot. Without the card in, the 8GB doesn't show up as legacy emulated, as I'm used to with Kitkat. Nope, it says sdcard1. Alright, cool. I slide the 64GB microSD card back in, with all the files I need to restore with Titanium Backup, and attempt to restore. Nope. "Trouble parsing the package, it states." Hmm. Okay. I read about this a long time ago. I'll let Titanium Backup find its folder by itself, save it, and try again. Nope. Alright, so what the hell. I keep messing with it until I notice something. It keeps defaulting on the sdcard0/Titanium Backup folder.

But wait, where did sdcard0 come from? We had sdcard1 being the internal storage so why would it be sdcard0 and not sdcard2. I still don't care about why they placed the sdcard above the internal memory, making all apps assume that card is actually the internal storage, which will make bigger mistakes in the future if I'm not careful and don't make sure that I ALWAYS install the apps to internal storage when asked.

The only way I fixed it was to move my Titanium Backup folder to sdcard1, and then it would restore as many as it could before it would fail because Samsung didn't intend on some of their apps (they shouldn't even be called apps; more like an extension to the framework that you've never used but you want to be safe and make sure you get every Samsung app)

3. Something else that is different with the Posh handset is that it's a dual sim card phone. This means that you can put two different sims, and if you had Google Voice or something, you could have 3 or even more depending on yourself of all different phones. I get why they did this. Why carry a work phone and a personal phone when you can just take the SIM card out of the work phone and plug it in, making one less phone, case, accessories, chargers, and so on that you don't have to carry. HOWEVER. I had AT&T put a normal sized SIM in the 1 slot and left the other empty. Went through activation and made and received phone calls and texts as my port had completed. Yet, there was still the other signal indicator with an X and in the notifications bar, there is a hazard sign with the text of "SIM 2 not active". Since this phone is so new and no one is talking about it, I have no damned clue how to hide it as it's not in their settings; even developer options. Nothing. I have a Google Fi sim though so I might just stuff it in there and make the notifications go away.

I'm realizing that while I might have gotten an excellent phone, I also got a new, and as a result unknown phone to the market. So while I scroll through and hear that this worked with a Moto X, or what worked with an HTC One, or trouble then success with Nexus 6 and 7's, oh and the Samsung device holders running CM11 or 12 that can't get it to work either. But this Posh phone... It has a 1.7ghz octacore processor. It is fantastically fast. I have zero bad things to say about it except the tiny speck of a community and that their Launcher is terrible but that's an easy fix.

And I forgot how much I lightly tapping on the turned off screen and getting brought to the home screen with the device unlocked.

After covering all of that, I have a couple of approaches I'd like to attempt. Due to the small community, I don't know what roms I can use. I'd love to try Ubuntu and this out because I'd have more of a... technical approach because I might be able to dupe the Gear S with activation on the Note 3 but then changing the bluetooth address of the Posh device to the Note 3's and see if I can bypass some of Samsung's safety measures. I mean, I'm already doing it sorta. I rooted the Gear S, set the Gear S completely up, and then went in with SDB shell to the bluetooth folder, deleted the file they had in it that was named the MAC address for the bluetooth on the Note 3 and then took the battery out. Then I went to Gear S, turned off bluetooth for a moment, made the Gear S discoverable, and boom, they are connected via bluetooth and I get notifications when I get texts and phone calls, emails, etc. because while it isn't a Samsung phone, the Gear S right now thinks it is. I don't even have any of the Samsung apps on my POSH. I took that from someone who said how they went through using a Samsung device, set all the accounts, everything up on the Gear S and then pulled the same trick so they could use it with an iPhone. Yet in the case of the POSH phone, it has the identical versions of all the same apps and since they never lost their connection and required a reset, everything is working but the S-Health stuff. Essentially I'm getting notifications via bluetooth, and updates to everything else because I have wifi on and it's keeping the news app, etc, up to date.

I'll work on it some more this weekend. I'm wondering if, since the POSH phone has an 8 core processor with 1.7ghz on each core, I could run an Android emulator with a super light TouchWiz Samsung setup in the background, and remote into my own device from my device. That way I could get complete support with a different phone, yet I wouldn't really need to access the emulator often because as we know, it's just there o add things, get updates, etc which all come over bluetooth. I think I could get S-Health, Weather, the gambit of most things we lost. Get a light, rooted, Kitkat (or Lollipop) rom for, say the Galaxy S3. Small file size and gutting all the bloat (might not even need Google Play as it has one goal, keep an interface between the main phone and the Gear S).

I'll tell you what I figure out.

TL;DR: Wow this is a pain in the ass, but what if we ran a small version of Samsung with Touchwiz on an emulator ran by your phone?