Samsung Gear Live, first impressions: Gear makes a leap to Android Wear, with heart rate
Smartwatches
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Hi I'm Scott Stein, and Google has launched a whole bunch of watches, running Android ware.
What does this mean, and what do these watches do?
Well, this it the Samsung Gear Live, which is an android ware smart watch, which runs on androids phone across the board.
Running 4.3 or higher for your, for Android operating system.
And you may want to check compatibility, because you got to have Bluetooth 4.0.
Now, how is this different for the other Android Ware watches?
The gear live, feels a lot like the other gears in design, but it has a feel extra tweaks going on here and a few extra features.
This is a heart rate monitor, like the other recent gears.
That's something that no other Android wear watch, has right now.
You've got a 320 by 320 Super AMOLED display, so it's a higher quality screen than on the LG G watch, it costs 199 for this, weirdly less expensive than LG's watch, better screen.
And a heart rate monitor, plus, the rest of it is pretty much the same.
Four gigs of storage on board, 512 megabytes of RAM, for what it's worth.
And, it has the same ability to run apps, and feels about as lightweight.
The design here, is kind of like a hybrid of a Gear Fit, and a Gear.
There's a metal band around here, metal, metal face, steel, curve, no button on the front part and no camera.
There's a button on the side and that acts as kind of a turn on turn off button.
And the pegs here the way it attaches are a bit more like a fit bit force, not a standard watch band.
So, if you don't like the idea of this popping upf, be forwarned.
But you can also swap out this watchband, with others.
Feels comfortable on my wrist, and Android Wear what it does, basically you're going to be talking to it, and tapping, and swiping to get notifications.
At the moment, it runs a lot like Google now, on your wrist.
So, if you're walking around and you're at a place you've been before.
It might pop up a reminder that you've been there, or in the morning weather will pop up, or it'll send Twitter notifications.
You start to get overwhelmed with notifications, and you can turn them on and off on an Android Wear app, that runs on your phone.
You can load it here, and you can mange those notifications, and you're gonna want to plus there are other apps, those are going to install on the phone, and then they're going to load onto this automatically.
Those aren't available yet, really.
So, what we're looking at this year, kind of basic Google services.
And a lot of it's voice based.
To get most things done, you're going to want to have to double tap, and then talk to it and it's a different idea because it's not really bringing up apps, it's more like, it's trying to learn and pick up your habits.
There are also elements of fitness.
You got the pedometer built into here, and you also have things like a stopwatch and the heart rate monitor.
What you get in the box is this.
And then you also get a little, plus-in charger cradle, micro USB, snaps on, and a little charge plug, and that's the whole story.
You get one of these now, well keep in mind the Moto 360, is going to be coming out this summer.
That's a whole different design, and there are going to be other Androidware watches.
Which one do you get?
Right out of the bag, I wouldn't go with one of these right away.
Wait and see what comes, and wait and see what Androidware becomes.
We don't even know yet, because these are just the very first few days.
Of the software, intriguing but evolutionary.
The Samsung Gear Live is available, now and it's going to be arriving by around July 8th, so stay tuned for more.
I'm Scott Stein at CNET with the Samsung Gear Live.
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