[Samsung Gear S3] veletron:
So, I have had this watch since late November, so, here's my honest opinion after ~7 weeks use. (I suspect I get unnecessarily flamed by Samsung Fans for this!!)

The Good

- The design, rotating bezel is the best attempt yet at a simple selection system for a smartwatch

- The battery life - I easily get 3 days

- The hardware - nice screen, snappy performance

- Answering/rejecting calls from the watch works very well and call quality is superb

- Notifications work well, but limited as to what one can do with them with non samsung phone

- Huge number of watch faces - but who needs more than one?

- When S-Voice is working (which is rarely) its handy for 'remind me to...', 'set alarm for...' requests.

- Controlling music player on phone works well enough

- Very few decent apps, but Remote Camera, Xenozu (Youtube), Gear Browser, Toggles, Flipboard work pretty well.

The Bad - (Warning - this is pretty scathing!)

- Only 1.4GB free on watch from the original 4GB

- Watch is full of junk that cannot be uninstalled (useless watch faces useless apps)

- Seriously compromised if not using with a Samsung phone (eg no email, limited sms messaging)

- No way to add SMS functionality via third party apps. Can send messages, but can not go back through old received messages.

- No Gmail/Email (pop3/imap) app, if you have a Samsung phone you get this feature, if not then tough. A stand alone imap-enabled client would have solved this.

- Often the only option in notifications is 'show on phone' eg from FB messenger/twitter notifications - where we are talking about just a few words, this defeats the purpose of the watch, I need to be able to read on watch and reply on watch. This limitation gets tiresome. 3rd parties EG FB/twitter could fix this with their own S3 app, or notifications that allow 'reply', but we all know they never will. Some other notifications (eg email are less limiting)

- Samsungs App store is god-awful - there are many poor quality, paid apps, and when one installs them and discovers they are rubbish there is NO WAY to get a refund (unlike the google play store). I have wasted £20 this way.

- Decent apps on the Samsung store are hard to come by. The (fairly pointless) Xenozu Youtube app, gear brower along with the widgets app (displays android widgets on yr watch) are about the only decent ones that exist. The latter eats battery on the phone though. One notable exception being the remote camera app which is good.

- Samsung pay still does not work in the UK, and no idea when or if it ever will.

- a good 80% of the 'apps' on the Samsung store are simply watch faces - I only need one watch face.

- What remains is an extremely poor collection of extremely buggy apps.

- The 'SMS Service is not available' response to S-Voice attempts to 'Send a text to xxx' requests is tedious. There was no need to screw the functionality up so much for non Samsung phone users.

- Very often S-Voice does not respond - just times out and gives a spoken error

- The remote connection (via wifi) when watch is not connected via bluetooth is unreliable. Its supposed to make a remote connection to phone and allow notifications/etc to still be sent to the watch. Most of the time, it does not work even where watch/phone are on same wifi network, I have never had it work when they are on different networks.

- The watch is fussy about wifi networks (it wont work at all in my workplace for instance). It connects, but no connectivity.

- S-Health is a pile of junk, it auto-detects cycling when I am doing 60MPH on the motorway for instance!!! Among many other issues. Where is the option to remove it and replace with Strava? S-Health on the phone also eats the phones battery in no time.

Samsung needs to up their game if they are serious about Tizen Smartwatches, supplying their own developers for free to the likes of facebook, twitter, whatsapp, hive, ifttt, Skitrax etc in order to ensure that apps for the watch get developed, or paying devs to develop for the platform. They also need to change their store to allow a refund window for rubbish apps.

Samsung could WRITE an IMAP app to fix the email hole on the watch (could be configured from phone, but then work without phone)

Nigel