Samsung Gear S2: Tizen on your arm

There are smartwatches – most of them powered by Android. And then there is the Apple smartwatch. There are non-Android smartwatches like Pebble, but what makes Gear S2 different is the Tizen OS.

Samsung seems to have got everything right – at least in the design department. The Gear S2 is one of the best-designed smartwatches. The Gear S2 is offered in two versions, Bluetooth and 3G.

The Gear S2 uses the round form factor and comes with a rotating bezel that can be used to move from screen to screen, instead of swiping. There are subtle clicks as the bezel is rotated.

The Gear S2 does what all Android Wear watches do – provide notifications for calendar, messages and calls.

It cannot be used to make or answer calls though – for that, we have to use the phone. And of course, we can listen to songs through a Bluetooth headset.

The watch integrates well with Samsung’s apps like S Health. You can use it to track how much water you drink or how much you have walked.

Though the Samsung Gear app has a sleep tracker, as of now there isn’t any app on the S2 to track your shut-eye time.

There is a heart-rate tracker, though, that could be quite useful. Another handy feature is the built-in watch face that keeps informing you about your heart rate. Other built-in watch faces from ESPN and Bloomberg also display news and data from the content sources.

The watch is compatible with Android phones, though it runs on Tizen, but it is not compatible with the Android Wear app.

There are a dozen built-in watch faces, and more can be downloaded from the Samsung Gear app.

The watch is paired to the phone through Bluetooth, but it can also be connected remotely through WiFi. The watch comes with a 250 mAh battery (and a 300 mAh one on the 3G version), and has to be charged through a wireless charger.

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