Last Friday, we received the Samsung Gear Sport, which was announced at IFA earlier this year. The Gear Sport runs Tizen 3.0 out of the box, and it is expected that Samsung will bring the upgrade to the Gear S3 Frontier and Gear S3 Classic as well.
What does Tizen 3.0 bring to the table? We've come across a few notable new features and improvements, and we've listed the major ones below.
Watch Only mode
Watch Only is a new feature on Tizen 3.0. When you activate Watch Only mode, the smartwatch will only show you the watch face and disable all other functions, including notifications. This means you can use it as a regular watch, and the battery will also last much longer. You'll lose all of the smart functionality, but Watch Only mode will be great for the times you just need a timepiece to, well, tell the time.
Bezel wake-up
Moving the bezel ring on Samsung's watches turns on the screen, and while this can be handy for some, it can be annoying if you're sleeping or in a situation where you don't want the screen to wake up unless you want it to. With Tizen 3.0, you can turn off the bezel wake function to prevent the ring from waking up the screen.
New icons
Samsung has upgraded icons with Tizen 3.0, and they now match the ones seen on devices like the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy Note 8. Not a lot to say here, except that there's higher consistency across Samsung's products.
Better preview when browsing watch faces
On Tizen 3.0, when you are looking for new watch faces to select, you'll see a preview of up to seven watch faces at the same time, so you have to scroll less to get the ones you like. Before Tizen 3.0, only one watch face showed up on the watch's display at a time, which made for more work when looking at the latest watch faces.
Water Lock mode
As the name suggests, when enabled, Water Lock mode disables the touch screen and motion sensors. Perfect for when you take your Gear Sport for a swim.
More quick toggles
The quick toggles on Samsung's previous smartwatches were too few to be truly useful, so Tizen 3.0 now gives you eight shortcuts in the toggles menu. There are shortcuts for Watch Only mode, Water Lock mode, and the settings, in addition to the usual suspects like brightness and do not disturb mode.
Suggestions in the settings menu
On Tizen 3.0, when you're browsing through the settings menu, you will find suggestions for settings that might be relevant, pretty much like the ones you see on your Galaxy S8 or Galaxy Note 8. It's useful for finding the right settings faster, especially on the small display on the Gear Sport.
That's it for the features that we think are notable on Tizen 3.0. Of course, we'll let you guys know if we come across more such features as we use the Gear Sport in the coming days. Hold tight for our review of the Gear Sport, and let us know what you think about Tizen 3.0!
