How Smart Is Samsung’s New Watch? | MIT Technology Review

How Smart Is Samsung’s New Watch? | MIT Technology Review

•  It can take photographs through a camera mounted on the wristband, facing away from the wearer, and has a pedometer that can track the wearer’s activity. 
• Over in New York, Samsung’s chief product officer, Kevin Packingham, was more matter-of-fact. He told me that for Samsung wearables are about a return to simplicity, which meant carefully editing the watch’s functions down rather than trying to pack in too much at once.
• The Gear, available with wristbands of six different colors and materials, has a 1.63-inch (or 41.4-millimeter) Super AMOLED display, with a 320-by-320 pixel resolution.(For comparison, the sixth-generation square iPod Nano, which had a similar color touch screen, had a 1.5-inch display with 240-by-240 resolution.)
• The Gear has an 800-megahertz processor, 512 megabytes of RAM, and four gigabytes of onboard storage. The first iPhone had four gigabytes of storage, 128 megabytes of RAM, and a 620-megahertz processor.
• The device is expected to cost $299 and has a 315-milliamp-hour lithium-ion battery, which Samsung says lasts about a day.
• The body of the Galaxy Gear is stainless steel, and at about 74 grams, it’s fairly heavy.
• There’s a sleep/wake button on the right-hand side, and the watch powers itself down quite quickly.
• It’s possible to interact with the Gear using simple gestures: a swipe upward activates the camera, while a swipe down brings up the home screen showing time, weather, and news headlines. A swipe to the right or left lets you scroll through contacts, logs, apps, settings, the pedometer, music, a gallery, voice memos, and notifications. It’s simple and largely works very well.
• The third-party applications available at launch include information management tools like Pocket and Evernote, fitness apps like RunKeeper, and more esoteric options like Vivino Wine Scanner, which allows users to take a picture of a bottle of wine and learn more about it.