Death by incompatibility: A Samsung Galaxy Gear review

When a new article is posted on the Internet, the first addition to the comments section is often an inconsequential, one-word statement: "First!"

The frequent "First!" cry of the Internet troll declares some strange pride in being the first to comment on an article. The commenter put little to no effort into the post; it added nothing to the conversation, and it was completely devoid of substance. The troll did secure the spot at the top of the thread, though, and every additional commenter will be forced to scroll past the pointless contribution.

The Samsung Galaxy Gear says "First!" in hardware form. Samsung has beaten Google and Apple as the first major manufacturer to market, but much like the Internet commenter, it has sacrificed substance for the sake of timing. The Galaxy Gear is a product (with some impressive internals, no less) that has such limited use and such crippling compatibility requirements that it is currently the equivalent of hardware spam. While the Gear won't even come close to serving the needs of the vast majority of people, we're going to be talking about smartwatches a lot in the coming months, so if nothing else, the Gear provides a great starting point.

The hardware

Enlarge / A close-up of the display.
Before we get into the list of deal-breakers, though, let's talk about the actual device. The face of the Gear features a 1.63-inch, 320×320 AMOLED touchscreen. A macro shot reveals the screen to have an RGBG "Pentile" subpixel layout, which means it has 33 percent fewer subpixels than a normal LCD. The Gear's display is passable, but the lower-quality subpixel layout combined with a PPI of 277 means this is not the super-dense pixel party to which we've grown accustomed. Samsung's software doesn't push the display very hard, though, so it's not a big deal.

The exterior of the case is pretty sparse, with only a power button and a few pinhole mics on either side. In this tiny space, Samsung manages to pack a 800MHz Exynos 4212 processor, 512MB of memory, 4GB of storage, and a whopping 315 mAh battery. CPU-Z recognizes the Exynos as a dual-core chip, but the second core seems to be permanently disabled.