If you’ve been waiting to see what Samsung would do to follow up their suite of fitness devices, you’ll be glad to know that today they have announced two new watches and a smarter pair of workout ready in-ear headphones. Say hello to the Gear Sport, Gear Fit2 Pro, and the Gear Icon X.
Whether you are interested in fitness tracking, sleep monitoring, or motivational coaching, these three products can help you meet your fitness goals while keeping you connected to the notifications you want to receive.
At Samsung, we celebrate the everyday athlete – whether you’re going for a light jog or training for your next triathlon. We have a long history of embracing choice and innovation, and our wearables are designed to help consumers of varying fitness levels meet their goals and aspirations. We want to help remove the stigma that fit can only mean one thing and that fitness trackers are complex and for only the most intense of workouts. — DJ Koh, President of Mobile Communications Business, Samsung Electronics
Both the new Gear Fit2 Pro and the Gear Sport will offer water resistance and swim tracking. They are each certified for 5 ATM water resistance and due to Samsung’s new partnership with Speedo, you can use the latest swimming training app, Speedo On, to track your lap time, lap count, stroke type, and more. Both new watches will also offer real-time, continuous heart rate monitoring.
Samsung has also updated their partnership with Under Armour, so you’ll have access to the Under Armor fitness apps which include UA record, MyFitnessPal, MapMyRun, and Endomondo, so you can track your activity, nutrition, sleep, and fitness. Their partnership with Spotify also makes these two new watches the only ones available now that offer Spotify Offline, which will give you access to up to 500 songs stored directly from your watch.
Both watches have built-in auto activity detection, which allows the watch to recognize when you are walking, running, cycling, or performing dynamic activities which include things like dancing or playing basketball.
All of these features allow you to personalize your own wellness plan with goals and alerts that make the most sense for your lifestyle. Both have up to 4 days of battery life.
So, let’s look at the watches!
Gear Fit2 Pro
The Gear Fit2 Pro is the updated version of Samsung’s popular Fit line. Available in a sharp-looking black on red or black on black, you can use the watch to track your activities with continuous heart rate monitoring. As I mentioned, the watch is waterproof to 5 ATM, and it is ready to track your activities on land or in water.
The Gear Fit2 Pro has built-in GPS tracking with accurate pacing as well as maps. The buckled strap design will keep the watch secure on your wrist, and there are a lot of different watch faces that will show all of your data.
The Gear Fit2 Pro has a 1.5″ curved super AMOLED display with a high-resolution color touchscreen. You’ll be able to order the Gear Fit 2 Pro online starting on August 31st for $199.
Gear Sport
If you prefer a more traditional looking watch, you’ll appreciate the Gear Sport. It’s loaded with features, and it will look great on your wrist whether you are working out or just getting through your day.
Available in blue or black, the Gear Sport has a really great mainstream look; with a 42.9mm case, an always-on display, and a large assortment of fashionable straps — including a hybrid rubber-based strap that has a leather strip on top, this is the watch that can go from the gym to work without you needing to swap out bands. Keep an eye out for the nylon bands that Samsung will be offering; I don’t have pictures of them here, but they were sporty and sharp.
Again, the Gear Sport has onboard GPS for tracking your bike rides, walking, and runs; the GPS data is calculated into your total caloric burn. Like the Gear Fit2 Pro, the Sport has continuous heart rate monitoring. Good for salt and freshwater swimming and tested to 5 ATM tested, you can also use this watch to track your water activities.
The Gear Sport is military grade certified; it is very durable with shock resistance and scratch resistance.
With the Gear Sport, you can control compatible Samsung IoT-enabled devices through Samsung Connect, you can use the watch as a remote control like when doing a PowerPoint presentation, and you can pay for goods at NFC Samsung Pay enabled merchants.
Up until this point, Gear fitness watches tracked calories, but they never really had a way to merge the data with the calories brought in. This is important to show you the correlation between the food you out into your body and the exercise you do. The new Gear watches make it easy to see how you are balancing your calories burned versus calories in for a more comprehensive overview of how you are doing.
I don’t have a price yet for the Gear Sport, but it will be out later this year.
And that brings us to the new wireless headphones …
Gear IconX
If you had the previous Gear Icon headphones, one of the things that you likely found lacking was battery life. Now, the battery life has been updated from 1.5 hours to up to 5 hours of Bluetooth streaming. You can get up to 7 hours of non-streaming music playback (they can store up to a thousand songs), and you can use them as a regular Bluetooth headset for up to 4 hours. The included charging case adds up to 4 hours of use. If you let the headphones run down and you need a quick recharge, you can plug them in for 10 minutes to get a full hour of battery life. The Gear IconX in-ear headphones are optimized for Spotify, but they will work with any streaming service.
The Gear IconX have a built-in personal running coach, and they will automatically start tracking your workouts once you start moving. They are truly wireless, and they come in black, pink, or gray, and they have a variety of ear gels and wing tips. The IconX also have built-in touch controls that allow them to interact with Bixby Voice.
For the fitness enthusiast, the Gear IconX automatically tracks your running routines, and also features standalone Running Coach which can be activated by simply tapping the earbud to provide in-ear audio6 exercise status updates – in real-time
I don’t have a price yet for the Gear IconX, but they will be out later this year.