Samsung Gear review

Battery life on the Samsung Galaxy Gear is actually much more impressive than Samsung is making out.

We've got a very odd situation here - a brand has actually underestimated battery life in a bid to make sure it doesn't get caught out with poor juice times, meaning the original claim of 25 hours is wildly unfair.

In practice, you can go at least two days without needing to charge the Galaxy Gear, and it will probably last longer than that.

Let's give an indication of usage: having the watch sporadically turning on, always connected to the Note 3, uploading every snap automatically to the phone, installing multiple apps on it, and generally poking around frequently led to a drop of 66% in just over 38 hours.

We can imagine that it will last even longer as time goes on and you fumble with the device less and less, so in short, we're pretty darn impressed with the life of this thing.

The screen even has an ability to boost its brightness for outdoor mode, and this didn't even show any poor effect on the battery life in general use.

It's obvious that having no Wi-Fi, no GPS and not even music playing from it will save a lot of energy, but the haptic feedback is strong, and if you've got the automatic updates turned on (where lifting your arm shows the time) this can fire the screen rather regularly.

The update hasn't had a noticeable effect on battery life, other than to slightly extend it a little further - this is even better given it was definitely more attractive to play with the watch given the notification changes.

Galaxy Gear Manager

Samsung has decided that on-device working isn't the way forward when it comes to managing settings and such, so it lumped on the ability to do all of this through the Gear Manager, which is located on your phone.

You can access this at any time throughout use, as it's a pervasive icon in the notifications bar of your phone. Once in, you're treated to a '70s throwback look, with brown adorning most of the app.

It's pretty fully featured, and sticks to Samsung's 'make it do so much that you'll never find all the settings' approach. Which we have to say we MUCH prefer over Apple or Microsoft's simplistic menus.

You can do everything in here from setting whether social networks pop up, to controlling third party apps, to entering the Galaxy Gear section of the Samsung Apps hub and more.

It's a pretty simple system to work out, and we especially like the fact you can change the clock face in so many ways, including the ability to append favourite apps to the bottom of one of the digital options.

It's rare we like controlling software so much on a secondary device, but in this case there's everything you need and more, as long as you know where to look.

This is also the place to 'Find my Gear', allowing you to ring the phone and wake up your other half when you've accidentally left it on their bedside table and you're trying to stumble off to work in the pitch black but realise you'll probably need the Gear if you're going to review it.

For instance.

The update to the Galaxy Gear comes with an update to the Manager too, but there's nothing to this apart from a much longer list of notifications you can allow to be shoved to the watch. You can choose any app that works in the notifications bar, so while it can take ages to tag the things you want, it's worth the effort.

The manager is still too hard to use in our opinion though - things like notification management should be front and centre rather than being hidden away.

Hands on pics