That …thing… is the latest Samsung Gear S smartwatch, which looks like the mutant offspring of a phablet and a larger phablet. However it came into being, Engadget isn’t impressed:
The Samsung Gear S is a device that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Sure, it’s great that it can act as a standalone smartwatch and doesn’t need a phone to make or receive calls. Except, well, it does. Not only does the Gear S need to be paired with a phone to be activated, but that’s also the only way to install or remove apps and the only way to get notifications from services like Gmail and Twitter. Certainly, the Gear S works well enough if you don’t mind its chunky size, small app selection and occasionally buggy software, but $350 is just too much to pay for a smartwatch with this many shortcomings.
What really shocked me is that the watch comes with a full web browser, Opera Mini, pre-installed. I can think of a lot of functionalities I want on my wrist, but a fully armed and operational web browser isn’t one of them. Can you imagine trying to accurately tap on an old-fashioned hyperlink on a page full of banner ads? Samsung just doesn’t know how to edit.
On the plus side though, I understand that if left on its own, the Gear S has the ability replicate itself thousands of times in the process of converting Jupiter into a small star.
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