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Apple Watch Vs Samsung Gear S

The showdown between the Apple Watch vs Samsung Watch (Gear S) ; this blog looks at the features of each and then how we imagine you could integrate them into your business operations.

Introduction

The much anticipated Apple Watch, acclaimed as “Apple’s most personal device yet”, is finally here! But does it match up against Samsung’s Gear S? We researched this new wearable technology to bring you the facts.

We briefly introduce and compare the two models and focus on the possibilities of the future that these Apple and Samsung (or others) watches can bring you. Read, get involved, and share your thoughts.

Components

Let’s start with the basics and break down the components of each watch:
The preference for one or the other will purely come down to your own preference and taste. Where it really gets interesting is when we dive down further into their features.

A few worthy features to stop and appreciate, …. or not

Stand Alone Wireless

The Gear S has the advantage of using a SIM card for standalone 3G service. This means you don’t need to be in close proximity to your phone. But don’t be fooled, the Gear S is still a companion device and needs to be paired to a phone either via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi/Cellular radios.

Input

Although the Apple Watch icons look similar, it’s layout and organisation and management is entirely new. With the familiarity of the winder on old school watches, the Apple Watch winder lets you zoom in and out, thereby eliminating the need to pinch/zoom on its smaller screen.

On the other hand, the Gear S is large enough that pinching/zooming gestures shouldn’t be an issue.

Controls

Apple Watch: The Apple Watch larger side button enables you to quickly bring up your friend’s thumbnail by a “tap”. This allows for your most frequent contacts to be kept, literally within arm’s reach to initiate a quick message or call.

Samsung is primarily controlled with swiping.

Voice Control

Siri has become much faster on the iOS 8 version, and we imagine by a much wider margin than the Samsung S Voice. Although we anticipate that Samsung has improved the S Voice version found on older Gear models.

Operating System

The Gear S utilises Samsung’s home-made operating system, Tizen. Although Samsung markets this as ‘growing its ecosystem” the drawback is that it is not as Robust as Android’s or Apple’s, but Samsung says it will feature around 1,000 Apps. This may sound like a lot, until you compare it to Apple’s 1.3 million apps.

Samsung is working on releasing the open source OS to create more apps, however, Apple has already released the WatchKit SDK to developers. An important point to make, Apple Watch currently has a limited number of apps, whilst developers are working on them.

User Interface

The User Interface (UI) of the Gear S will be familiar to those owning a smartphone. On the other hand, the UI of the Apple Watch is very different to its iPhone. Whilst the icons are familiar, the navigations comes from the watch menu, carousel through the apps and zoom in and out of maps or images using the Digital Crown. Additionally, the watch detects touch and responds to pressure for different command.

Display Materials

What’s unique of the Apple product is that the display is made of sapphire crystal, making it extremely durable (the Standard & Edition lines have it, the Sport line uses Ion-X in its place). Samsung on the other hand uses Gorilla Glass.

Most Unique Feature

The Gear S is ground breaking in that it can take and makes calls through its 3G connectivity. On the other hand, the Apple Watch supports Apple’s mobile payments platform, Apple Pay. Using the device’s Touch ID and near-field communication (NFC), users can confirm payments online and at over 220,000 supporting merchants worldwide, and the technology is due to make its way down-under this year.

Biggest Drawback

The one drawback of the Samsung Gear S is that it runs on Tizen. Given Tizen’s small ecosystem, the appeal to develop app is low. The drawback of Tizen is Apple’s strengths.

Apple’s most notable weakness is its dependence on the iPhone. Although the Apple Watch uses Apple’s Connectivity and Hand off feature to take calls and push notification from any app on the iOS ecosystem, if the watch had its own 3G connectivity that would really be game changing.

Added Extras

There are some features from both watches which we think you will be excited about, most notably the fitness focus of the watches.

Applications for your business

Cashless payments:

Apple Pay feature offer a promising venture for cashless payments which could see customers enjoying the convenience of such payments. Of course, the business would also benefit. Cashless payments have been shown to increase revenue by up to 20% in some industries.

New research released separately by PayPal and Visa this week reveals an expanding appetite for mobile phone payments. While there are discrepancies in the numbers – PayPal’s research suggests that 33 per cent of Australians have bought products or services using a smartphone, Visa says the figure is 43 per cent – the trend is clear; Australians want to use their phone as a payments device.

Meanwhile, Cap Gemini’s World Payments Report for 2014 suggests that this year mobile payments could rise 60 per cent, accounting for 47 billion payment transactions.

Notifications:

The Apple Watch pushes notification from apps to your watch. This could very well prove useful to ensure you never miss anything, even if you get stuck talking to a client or colleague. The Apple Watch could also remind you of upcoming client appointment, even if you forget your iPhone on your desk, so long as you are connected to Wi-Fi.

Fitness tracking:

We see potential for the Apple Watch and Gear S to work in conjunction with some of the latest technology fitness developments such as Precor’s equipment and innovations to come from Links such as My Workouts (via Active Carrot). The Apple Watch could capture your heart-rate and track your daily activity, which could then be transferred or integrated into my workout.