Unlike the original Galaxy Gear, which has a full build of Android 4.2.2 on board, the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo are running the Tizen OS – an open-source OS Samsung played a big hand in developing. That’s good and bad, of course. It’s great for those who have been waiting to see Tizen on a mainstream product (insofar as smartwatches are mainstream, we suppose) and bad for the tinkerers. That’s also led Samsung to drop “Galaxy” from the product name.
I don’t care much about the Gear, but I like that Samsung is finally using Tizen for something.
The most interesting thing to me is that Samsung is evidently committed to using the Galaxy brand only for Android products. I think that’s probably wise, to avoid tarnishing the name. It will, however, make it even more difficult to launch a Tizen phone if they still intend to do so.
I doubt they will find developers willing to embrace their Bada C++ based dialect.
Most of us are quite happy to have seen Symbian C++ and Symbian influenced Bada C++ go to oblivion.
Tizen native documentation is time travel to Bada C++ documentation, no thanks.
I thought that Tizen was based on the Enlightment foundation libraries.
Nope,
https://developer.tizen.org/dev-guide/2.2.1/org.tizen.native.appprog…
Enjoy the two phase initialization, memory management by convention with method suffixes and all the other wonders from Symbian/Bada days.
Thing about smartwatches is that they are the wrong solution to the problem at hand. The problem, as I see it, is that people want smartwatches because they are tired of digging their phones out of their pockets and glancing at them several times a day. But why do they do that? Because their phones keep vibrating/beeping at them, letting them know there is a notification they need to tend to, even though the vast majority of those notifications were either something the person could care less about, or could’ve waited until later to see. So in essence, the REAL problem is that phones absolutely SUCK at being intelligent enough to show you only notifications that you care about. Getting a smartwatch is really only putting a band-aid on the problem… like getting a pair of ear plugs because you’re tired of your smoke detector going off all day when the battery runs low.
What the industry needs to address is making phones much, much smarter in this area. For example, why can I not tell my phone, ‘Silence all notifications, unless my wife/boss/whoever tries to contact me’? And really, it shouldn’t matter what method/app they use to initiate the contact. Another issue is that in most apps, the sender has no way of specifying whether the message they’re sending to you is urgent or not. So you can’t just silence your phone except for any urgent messages, because your phone has no way of knowing what is urgent and what isn’t. Moreover, when someone calls you, there’s really no way to set a ‘do not disturb mode’, such that the user gets a message that says, ‘I am busy eating/sleeping/jerking off whatever. If this isn’t urgent, just leave me a message. If it IS urgent, then press 1 to ring through to my phone …’ How many of you would like to automatically send your boss to voicemail if he/she tries to contact you on weekends?
With all this ranting, I guess what I’m trying to say is that people who think there’s not much more that phones can do in the area of innovation can suck it
Edited 2014-02-24 02:05 UTC
My ten year old Nokia can do this perfectly well. If today’s phones are not capable of doing such simple things I’d say it’s a major regression.
Unless Samsung and other phone manufacturers already ships with such capabilities, there is an app for that, and probably more than one.
Is there?
Really? So you’re 10yo phone can recognize when one person is trying to contact you – whether on Facebook, Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, etc… it can recognize that this is the same person?
Enable “Quiet Hours” under Settings –> Sound. Disable all sounds, notifications, LEDs, etc. Then enable the Whitelist for contacts that can by-pass the quiet settings.
Just about every custom 4.4 ROM, most custom 4.3 ROMs, and several OEM 4.2+ ROMs include this feature. It was part of the LG 4.2 install on my LG G2. And it’s part of the SlimKat 4.4 ROM currently installed on my G2.
Do you still need to pair it with a cellphone? If so, then this is a non-product.
Worse, you have to pair it with one of a select group of Samsung phones.
If you don’t have a compatible samsung phone, don’t bother buying the watch.
Its worse than broken.