[Samsung Gear S3] gpsanino:
A "temporary" solution

Exactly, that is why this is a problem. There are several important menus, that are hidden as soon as you connect the watch with a phone. And there are cases when you can get the phone with one time and the watch with another, despite some people believe the watch syncs the time with the time on the phone. It does not. What I found after loosing most of the day, is that there is a bug that makes the watch to give a higher level to the timezone set on the phone than the time that is set on the phone. Therefore if you set your time on the phone manually, without caring about the timezone (because you set the time manually), you may end with the watch with a wrong time and unable to fix it directly. The watch will not have the appropriate menus enabled nor will Gear provide a way to manually adjust the time on the watch.

So here is a text I prepared after receiving a response from Samsung Support recommending me to reset the watch (of course loosing most features and a lot of data). Do not do it. There is a workaround.

I explain everything below. Please excuse me for the lenght.

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I FOUND A TEMPORARY "SOLUTION"

I lost most of the day doing tests, reading a trying to find a solution. I got an answer from Samsung Support as well. They recognize there is a problem as well as the many issues of their only solution, that is to perform a factory reset of the watch - which would not make the watch to regain full control of the menus neither.

Here is what I found so far:

the menus Date and Time - Timezone - Language, under /settings/Device/ simply disappear as soon as you connect the watch with Gear app on a phone. You use Gear app? then check your watch and verify if you can adjust the time and date with its own settings menu... you cannot. Neither the language nor timezone.

If you have your phone set with automatic time/date/timezone, and your are not traveling between timezones, nor your local government changes arbitrarily the time, and your local cellphone providers are such that you never need to adjust manually the time/date on your phone, then you have no problem on your watch neither, despite you did lost these menus as well and you cannot use a different language on the watch than your phone, and if you loose your phone you will not be able to change the time/date on your watch without pain. It may be rare to think on cases like these, but I am one of them; because I want to have my phone in English due to some translation limits on some of my apps, but would like to have my watch in french. If connected to Gear app, this is simply impossible (at least to this post's date and time).

If you find yourself in a situation like missing/loosing/getting robbed your phone and you need your watch to have changed its time/date for some reason (your are ready to take a flight overseas), you cannot do it. Despite being a watch, it does not provide a way to adjust manually the time/date/timezone/language. These options on the settings are lost as soon as you connected the watch to your lost phone. Your only way to regain control is to reset the watch and set it as "standalone" without connecting it to any phone. During the first steps of the setup, the watch asks or provides the chance to choose "standalone" rather than connecting it to a phone. Of course you will loose many things (updates, files, apps, faces, settings, etc.). But you will be able to use the watch as a watch because you will have all the needed the menus.

Samsung Support recommended me as a solution, to reset the watch. This is not accurate. Do not do it. If you do that and later your phone offers to restore it from a previous backup, the watch will still not have the menus to be able to adjust the time and date among others. The problem persists. Also, the Backup/Restoring process is far from being complete neither. You have to know that even using a recent restore, you will loose at least: all your alarm sets, apps updates, your widgets and the order you set them, the cities on your world clock, any change on the units on the Altimeter/Barometer etc and any transferred file to the watch. So, this proposed "solution" does not seem correct to me nor fair. You loose too much on the process and it does not get you back control on the menus that disappear once connected to Gear app. The only actual (to this day) way to recover these menus, is if you reset the watch, and then you set the watch from scratch as “standalone” without linking it to a phone with Gear app. I tried and did some tests on this mode as well. It connects to wifi networks but you cannot retrieve the apps you bought, nor use Samsung Health properly, nor even receive files trough bluetooth from a Pc/Mac/Linux computer. I was able to pair the watch with my computer but after three seconds it closes the connection. Just like my Samsung NX1 (also with Tizen). They are locked to connect only with their own apps.

A temporary "solution"

This is not elegant but it is better than the proposal I receive from Samsung Support today.

The watch, when using it with Gear app on a phone, hides the menus

that should never hide

, and then seems to sync time/date/timezone/language with the phone. But it does it, not the way you would expect. The watch does it by giving more value to the timezone set on the phone rather than the time itself that is set on the phone. It should sync to the time rather the timezone, but this is key to know.

So, the workaround is:

1. do not reset your watch (not needed)

2. connect the watch with Gear app to your phone as usual

3. disable on your phone the features "automatic date and time" and "automatic time zone". Both are set by collected data from local cellphone towers that I have found in several countries, to not update their time soon enough when changing seasons etc. Again, if you are in a reliable cellphone network, you do not have this problem and you can keep these features automatic. This is a workaround for people like me, that travel into sites without reliable data from cellphone network providers and in need to manually be able to adjust time and date on the smartwatch.

4. adjust the time zone on the phone to one that fits your local UTC or GMT conditions. Like me, now in Chile, I changed manually to "Brasilia GMT-3" fooling the watch. Check your watch because with this, it may already have corrected the time regardless of the time you have on your phone. This proves that Gear S3 sets its time by syncing based more on the time zone rather than the time set on the phone.

5. also, adjust manually the time on your phone.

6. you are set. Do not forget to manually change your time zone and time according to the local conditions as soon as they change.

About the language, there is nothing you can do. Once connected to Gear app, the watch cannot be used in a different language than the phone. With this workaround you can fool the watch and force it to change the time, using the time zone on the phone (not just the time).

Do not you agree with me that at least "Time and Date" should be able to be adjusted manually on any watch? Even more on the flagship of the smartwatches? Gear S3 is primarily a watch.

This is what I think it should be improved with the next updates:

- Gear app should include on the settings, the options to set Time, Date, Timezone and Language on the watch independently from the phone.

- The watch should keep all the menus from Standalone mode, despite being connected to Gear app. Then the option to manually set these variables on the watch, regardless if you have or not your phone nearby and without needing to reset nor loose any information.

Samsung Support, also stated this: “Hopefully you might be getting the feature that you are expecting in the software updates which will be released in the future.”

Lets hope for the best, but always be prepared for the worst

kind regards!