At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Samsung finally put an end to the weeks of rumours and launched 2 new smartwatches, the Gear 2 and Gear Neo.
The latest in their range of smartwatches (their Galaxy Gear smartwatch was unveiled in September last year), the Gear 2 and Gear Neo will be hitting stores in the next few weeks. Let’s take a look at these brand new wearables from Samsung.
Samsung have gone with a Tizen operating system for the Gear 2 and Gear Neo smartwatches rather than the Android based OS in the Galaxy Gear. Both the new models come with a 1.63-inch AMOLED display and will be compatible with most of the newer Samsung Galaxy smartphones.
The brand new smartwatches have a great range of features. Connect them up to your Galaxy mobile phone and the Gear 2 and Gear Neo will keep you up to date with notifications of emails, texts and calls. As well as notifications both smartwatches facilitate making and receiving calls, texts and emails and are also compatible with S Voice, Samsung’s voice recognition app.
In addition to the communication side of things, the Gear 2 and Gear Neo feature a music player, alarms and you can access to your Galaxy smartphone calendar. They are both fully integrated with Samsung’s S-Health and include a built-in heart sensor and can track the number of steps you take as well as featuring various sleep and exercise monitoring modes. There’s also a WatchON remote-control feature so you can control your TV or set top box from your smartwatch rather than using the remote control.
The Samsung Gear 2 is the heavier of the 2 as it also comes with a 2-megapixel camera which is now located on the front of the watch itself. As a result the Gear 2 weighs in at 68 grams compared to 55 grams for the Gear Neo. The Gear 2 camera can record video in 720p as well as snapping photos. Both devices are powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor and include 512MB of RAM alongside 4GB of memory. The 300mAh battery will power the smartwatches for between 2-3 days per charge.
The new slimmer design also includes IP67 certified water and dust resistance meaning they are robust as well as easy on the eye. Both the Gear 2 and Gear Neo come in 3 choices of colours, a golden shade of brown, black and bright orange for the Gear 2 and black, orange and a mocha grey for the Gear Neo.
