Samsung may have taken smartphone design cues from Apple (and rightly so), but on the wearables front, the Seoul giant has noticeably, and smartly, differed.
The Samsung Gear S2 and the Apple Watch both suffer from the same flaws – notably a lack of apps – but the Gear 2 has a more elegant rounded face, a more intuitive operating system, and wider compatibility.
The Gear
The Gear 2 runs on Samsung's proprietary Tizen OS, which cleverly uses the watch's rotating bezel to maneuver between the apps, texts, calls and notifications the wearer wants to use or see. The tactile nature of the bezel is intuitive – much more so than the Apple Watch's temperamental touch screen.
And the Apple Watch is of course tethered to the iPhone, while the Gear 2 works with any Android phone, even non-Samsung ones. Gear 2 wearers will thus have a much larger universe of phones available to them. In terms of the hype the two wearables received, the Gear 2 lives up to it far better.
Pay up
Samsung Pay and Apple Pay are the device makers' foray into the digital wallet space. Like real world wallets, there are subtle, but important differences between the two.
Here's how they are alike: setup and use. With both, users upload their card information, either manually or by taking a picture of the card, and then tap their phones on the merchant's point of sale machine when its time to pay for something.
This final step though, the "tapping," is where the functionality of the two services diverges.
Apple Pay only works with point of sale machines that have built-in NFC (near-field communication) technology. While most PoS machines produced today are NFC enabled, older credit card readers are not. Retailers who've been around a while (like that favorite dry cleaner's) may be Apple Pay incompatible.
Samsung Pay, however, works with nearly any PoS machine or credit card reader thanks to its Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) antenna. Through this antenna, Samsung Pay sends a brief burst of coded information to the credit card machine (even older terminals), tricking the machine into registering the phone-stored credit card as if it was just swiped.
Whether the point of sale machine is NFC enabled or not, Samsung Pay is likely able to work with it – a key innovation that sets it apart from Apple and other digital wallets.
