There’s one thing the Samsung wearables range lacks – the ability to connect to other, non-Samsung devices. Being the world’s largest phone maker allowed Samsung to pull this off but with many other companies targeting our wrists, perhaps it would be best to change this strategy.
At the moment, Samsung Gear device owners are gently forced to stick to Samsung-made mobile devices. While this strategy works for Apple and its army of fanboys and fangals, I’m not sure it will work equally well for the Korean company. Sure enough, Samsung is a king of the day, but we’ve no idea what the future holds. We should be able to buy a phone made by some other company and keep using the watch we have.
I appreciate what Samsung did with its Tizen-based Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo smart watches, and would personally love to get the former model (the one with a camera). But I don’t have the Samsung smartphone and I also happen to think that Android Wear is still a work in progress. While we wait for Google to launch version 2.0 of its wearables platform, some of us would want to get the Gear 2 in the meantime, though without changing the phone we currently own.
So yes – I hope Samsung will come to its senses and allow every Android device owner to join the Gear party. On that note, they should also open up the S Health app to other phones. What do you think?