[Samsung Gear S] HagbardCelineII:
My wife bought me the international version of the Samsung Gear S (SM-R750W). She said that she researched and from her understanding it should work on the T mobile network. From what I've found though the consensus seemed to be it would not work, or if it did it would be spotty at best depending on the specific towers/area you were in because Tmobile utilizes different network types in different areas.

I decide to give it a shot anyway and went to the T-Mobile store where I signed up for the wearable plan and got a new nano sim card. I was crossing my fingers but as soon as they put the sim card in the watch it came to life. It looked to be working fine but as I left the store I received a text from T-Mobile stating " the SIM for your wearable devices is in an ineligible device. Services to the SIM are locked until it returned to your eligible wearable device".

I pessimistically started thinking well great, there goes that idea. But as I got into my vehicle I shut my phone down and tried to see if the watch can work on its own as a phone when unencumbered from my Note 4 bluetooth/WiFi data connections. It worked perfectly-I started calling my friends and they couldn't believe I was talking on a watch phone. Several I actually felt the call sound quality was better on the watch speaker phone compared to normally speaking on the Note 4. I called customer service but they told me they couldn't see anything and if it was working fine not to worry about it.

For the next eight or 9 hours it worked perfectly and I was using it a lot. I drove around large swaths of town and neither data nor call experienced even the slightest issue - for once I was happy to be wrong.

Eventually, as I am oft to do, I fell asleep. When I awoke this morning the watch was no longer connected to the network. It gave me a message saying it was unable to connect and did I want to scan for additional networks. I selected yes and it was able to find the T-Mobile and ATT networks. T-Mobile was selected and a "registering" notification was displayed. It took awhile but eventually said it was unable to register with the network.

I call T-Mobile and they said pretty much exactly what I expected them to say -that because it was not a T mobile device they could not ensure proper operation. But he said (and he characterized this as "good news", "light at the end of a tunnel" and "viable solution” Seriously said all 3 things.) I could either forget all about the cellular connection and just use this as a companion device OR go and buy a new Gear S from T Mobile if I really wanted that feature.

I’m truly and utterly baffled that he believed his suggestions merited the positive sayings from above. Never in my lifetime has my head been closer to exploding.

After I was finally able to speak again, I explained that it seemed unlikely to be an issue with the watch. If my Gear S was working perfectly yesterday and can still detect Tmobile & ATT networks, then something on your end seems to be preventing registration. He agree to file a ticket with the engineering team and tomorrow I should hear from them hopefully. He also told me to go and try another nano-SIM, gratis, at the Tmobile store. So today I went and as soon as I put the new card in all systems were go. I assumed that I somehow had received a bad card because here again now, data and voice are connected.

This time I didn’t even make it out of the parking lot before it notified me that that it was again unable to register with the network. There is conflicting information regarding the radio frequencies and bands that the different Gear S models have and I didn’t have high hopes. But then it actually did work, WELL, so any ideas as to what is going wrong?