Samsung Gear Sport Unboxing, Hands-on, First Impressions

The Samsung Gear Sport, along with other wearables Gear Fit2 Pro and Gear Icon X, were all launched a few months ago at IFA 2017. The Gear Sport is finally here in the Philippines, and we now have it on our wrist.

As always, before we give you our full review, let’s begin by taking it out of the box and presenting our initial thoughts on the device.

Just as with most Samsung devices, the box the Gear Sport comes in is simple, but elegant. As we opened it up, we were glad to see that the smartwatch itself was surrounded by adequate foam padding. It’s not completely surrounded by it, but it’s in the right places.

Other than the Gear Sport itself, the box contains your quick start guide and warranty cards, a micro USB charger, and a wireless charging dock.

The Gear Sport features a round face in contrast to the more sporty, rectangular faces of the Gear Fit2 and Fit2 Pro. It has a stylish, dark metallic design which makes it very usable in casual, and maybe even more formal settings if you change the strap. By default, it comes with either a black or blue rubber strap, but it can be replaced with any 20mm watch strap.

The round touch display is a 1.2-inch Super AMOLED panel with a resolution of 360 x 360. It is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass. Aside from the touchscreen, navigation is done by rotating the bezel, or with the two physical buttons on the right side.

It has a bunch of sensors, including a heart rate monitor, accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer, and ambient light sensor. The Gear Sport uses all of these for its fitness and other smart functions, such as calorie tracking, workout detection, and it can even be your own fitness coach on your wrist.

The Gear Sport is powered by an unspecified dual-core processor clocked at 1GHz and 768MB of RAM. While you can stream music with services like Spotify, it comes with 4GB of internal storage where you can store a few hundred songs. It runs on Tizen OS 3.0, which looks clean and simple. So far during our initial testing, it is running quite smoothly.

The watch is powered by a 300mAH battery, which Samsung claims will last 3-4 days. We will be sure to test this in our full review. Charging is handled by an included wireless charger, which is good, as nowadays it is a must for smartwatches.

It also has a good selection of connectivity features including Bluetooth 4.2, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, GPS/Glonass, and NFC. As for water resistance, it has a 5ATM rating, which means it can withstand pressures equivalent to a depth of 50 meters.

The watch is quite light and feels nice on the wrist, even with the stock strap. It’s a really nice watch on its own and can easily fit in with a more casual outfit by default.

The Samsung Gear Sport is now available at Samsung Concept Stores and Lazada (listing here) and is priced at Php14,990USD 255INR 21,655EUR 243CNY 1,860