Galaxy Note 3 and gear is one of Samsung’s Smart gadget entries of 2013. The two are a power couple that work best in the presence of the other.
The Note 3 can however work on its own, serving the purpose of many other Samsung Smartphones.
Though an interesting Smart watch, Gear has one setback - it works only with one phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3.
Without the Note 3, the watch can't even tell time.
The Note 3 boasts of 5.7-inch display with a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixel, it's large enough for ease of web browsing and watching videos.
Beyond the wide, slim and flashy look is a 2.3 GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor with 3 gigabytes of RAM, up to 32 gigabytes of storage, and a microSD card slot that can house an extra 64 GB.
The main camera has a 13-megapixel sensor and can shoot 1,080p HD video, it also has a front-facing camera whose sensor is 2 megapixels.
The stylus (S pen) is another useful addition to the Smartphone that makes keying in details into the phone a little bit faster and efficient.
The phone has a long battery life of up to 25 hours talk time and 22 days on standby.
To use the duo, you need to download the Gear Manager app to your Note 3, the watch and phone pair themselves after you touch the OK button on a few screens.
Gear tells time, displays current weather, a few app icons, your pedometer step total or your next calendar appointment on its 1.6 inches screen.
The Gear is water-resistant, and it's pretty big - the watch itself is more than 2 inches long and about as thick as a pencil.
Navigating on the Gear is done with the swipe of a finger.
Swipe to the left or right from the home screen to access the watch's apps, which largely overlap with phone apps such as contacts, phone call logs, pedometer, photo albums, notifications, voice memos, a media controller (to control music playing from the phone) and a few others.
The Gear has a 2-megapixel camera, pictures are stored in the watch's 4 GB of storage, they can also be transfered them to the camera manually or automatically.
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You can place and answer phone calls from the watch which acts as a Bluetooth headset. The speaker and microphone are housed in the watch band's buckle.
The volume of the watch's speaker is good, but gets better if you face the tiny speaker toward your ears.
You can never overlook the watch’s ability to see incoming text messages and reply to them with S Voice dictation.
Most interesting is that you can use the watch to locate the phone and vice versa if you ever lose one or the other.