Get fit with Samsung’s Gear Fit2 smart fitness watch

Was the recently announced Mi Band 2‘s OLED display too small for your liking? If that’s the case, perhaps the 1.5-inch Super AMOLED panel on the front of Samsung‘s latest smart fitness tracker, the Gear Fit2, can entice you.

Alongside Samsung’s brand new pair of truly wireless earbuds, the South Korean electronics giant also unveiled their latest fitness tracker which will serve as a replacement for the old Samsung Gear Fit. This new smart fitness tracker is a pretty significant upgrade over the old Gear Fit.

First up, it gets a higher resolution screen. Despite being a touch smaller diagonally at 1.5″ over the old 1.84″ Gear Fit, the Gear Fit2’s panel is almost twice as wide with 216×432 pixels compared to the previous generation’s 128×432 pixels. The larger screen means you can do more with the watch, including navigation, view more fitness data and reply messages among others.

The new watch is also running on Samsung’s Tizen OS with half a gig of RAM and 4GB of onboard storage. That extra amount of storage means that the watch will be able to work as a standalone device. This means that you can install apps straight onto your Gear Fit2, though, the only third party app you can install right now is Spotify. But that isn’t too shabby because you can now listen to music directly from your watch. However, the watch only has WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity options but you’ll likely be able to save your playlists to your watch’s onboard storage before a run.

Samsung’s Gear Fit2 also has built-in GPS tracking and it has the ability to automatically detect when you’re in a workout or when you’re asleep, sort of like what FitBit does with their watches. It can also track the other usual health metrics like sleep, steps, heart rate and various others.

It’s also got a 200 mAh battery which Samsung says can give you between 3-5 days of battery life on a single charge. To match Samsung’s new flagship devices, the Gear Fit2 is also IP68 water resistant so you can bring your smartwatch wherever you bring your Galaxy S7/S7 edge smartphone.

Perhaps the worst part of the Gear Fit2 is that it’s only compatible with Android smartphones running Android 4.4 and above with at least 1.5GB of RAM. So, if you’ve got an iPhone, you won’t be able to pair this with your smartphone and since there’s no desktop app, you can’t sync the data to your PC either. You can, however, use it as a standalone health-tracking device. But, with so many other options out there, would you really want to? Perhaps you would, considering how low the price of this device is.

The Gear Fit2 will be available globally from 10th June onwards and will be priced at USD179 (around RM743), which is noticeably cheaper than fitness trackers Fitbit’s Surge (priced at RM1,280). I think it also looks a lot better than the Surge, but taste is subjective I suppose.

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