I was out shopping with my wife and noticed my local O2 stores in Plymouth, Devon had the Gear Fit and Gear 2 Neo on display, and both in stock. I really do surprise myself sometimes with such “Superman” eyesight.

I choose the Gear Fit as it looked a lot better than the bland Gear 2 watch. Ironically, the Gear 2 Neo and Fit were priced the same at £179, or £50 off if you bought them with a Samsung S5. Anyway, in the box you got the mains charger, clip on plastic cradle to charge the Fit and some leaflets.

And this is the oddity. The Fit whilst it has a curved amoled screen, looks damn odd to have to clip on this piece of plastic, which no doubt people will mislay. The cradle has a micro usb slot on the side. I was not too impressed with the overall thickness of the device.

The Fit is meant to last 4-5 days light use, 3 days heavy use, has an IP67 waterproof and dustproof rating, runs Tizen, and has a built in heart rate monitor. That battery life is overstated. More on that later. To set up the Fit you need to download the Gear Fit Managaer from Samsung App store, a relatively simple process.

You then have access to a number of customisations. I personally as you can see from the shot of the Fit on my wrist choose a black background.

Below is a list showing all the functions available on the Fit.

You then have a host of other options as shown in the screen shots below.

With regards to notifications, apart from Phone Call Rejections and Text Messages templates there is no other interactivity available. You can merely browse through the notifications, delete individually or delete all. The delete all is great as it covers all notifications from all the apps in one go.

Also, deleting notifications on the Fit does not delete them on the Samsung device. It is worth noting that the Fit works with 17 different Samsung devices.

So the setup is really simple. Next open S health and make sure you can sync the devices. This should be fine, but I changed the sync to the shortest delay of 3 hours. The delay between syncs is all the way up to 24 hours. Also, in the Fit settings you have a few more options from allowing motions to turn display on, what to display by default, which wrist the Fit is fitted too, select what double tapping the home button activates, changing the display to vertical (this is a must in my book) and the display brightness. The brightness scale is 1-5 and 6 is outdoor mode but rather uselessly only stays active for 4 minutes. In bright sun you will need 5, as if you set to 6, it then defaults back to level 4.

So what is it like in use. Actually not too bad. I tried the Samsung S Sleep app which was meant to provide information from the Fit about your sleeping. It did nothing apart from blind my wife every time I moved the Fit flashed the time in front of her eyes. So using the Fit with the S5 and the S Health app was a much better experience. The user interface of the Fit works really simply and is hassle free. Basically it does what it says on the tin!

If you want to use the heart rate you can measure this manually by selecting the option, but when you choose exercise on the Fit and select the type of exercise, it monitors everything in real time. Below is the information provided by the S Health app after I walked for 90 minutes over some demanding gradients.

The Gold award icon also appeared in the Fit display so I knew I had achieved my daily 10,000 steps already.

Plenty of data for those that like this sort of thing.

You can always check progress during the activity as well from duration and heart rate etc..

The GPS data is taken from the Samsung S5.

So do you think it looks impressive? The Samsung S Health app is very detailed and well thought out, but I just cannot get over the thickness of the Fit. From a distance even a small distance it looks good, but it is bulky and then needs the additional piece of cradle plastic to charge it. But the killer reason why I won’t be keeping it is the battery life.

When I got home, I was busy with household tasks, so left the Fit to charge for ages. After just 24 hours and using it for a 90 minute walk, the battery was at 44%. So, after a few charges the battery life improved, but with only 2 days battery life. Now if I used it to monitor say a cycle commute to work and back and my work out in the gym, I doubt it would last the day.

So in summary, it is reasonable, just not good enough yet.