Samsung released multiple wearable devices this year including the Gear Fit 2, Gear Icon X and Charm. Samsung’s first showcased Charm, its most stylish fitness band, in February along with the Galaxy S7 and S7 edge. Now, the South Korean tech giant has released a video that explains how to get started with its stylish fitness band.
Charm comes in three colors – Black, Gold, and Rose Quartz – so that it can match with your lifestyle or fashion preferences. It can be paired to a compatible smartphone through Bluetooth using the Samsung Charm app. Apart from tracking your daily activities and syncing relevant information to S Health, the fitness band can also alert you about smartphone notifications.
Samsung claims that it can last up to 14 days after a single charge. You can also mix and match Charm with various third-party bands. The square model costs €29.99, while the rectangular model costs €39.99. Watch the complete video that’s embedded below to get the complete idea about Charm.
Samsung announced the Gear 360 back in February at Mobile World Congress this year as a 360 camera for regular consumers with great specifications. The Gear 360 is available in many countries right now and it is time we put this little camera to the test. Samsung gave us the opportunity to do so, and we tested the Gear 360 in various ways.
Let’s see how the Gear 360 fares.
Design
2016 is the year of virtual reality, and every company wants to pitch in. Samsung itself is in the market since the Galaxy Note 4, in partnership with Oculus. However, content for virtual reality has been lacking except for what you see on Facebook and YouTube, and with the Gear 360 Samsung is hoping you will create the content for the Gear VR.
Let’s start with the basics of the design. The Gear 360 uses two cameras that look fish eyes. These are the so-called fisheye lenses that can make photos as one half of a sphere, resulting in a 260 degree sphere when the lenses are combined. On top of the Gear 360 lies the record button, with a little PMOLED screen that shows the current mode the camera is operating in. There’s a button for switching through various functions, and the bottom of the Gear 360 has a tripod connector.
On the right side is a flap that covers the battery, microSD and microUSB slots. This flap is rather tough to open, which is a deliberate feature as the camera is IP68 certified and has to protect against dust and water. The camera also has a couple of LED lights that show when the lenses are on, in addition to a couple of microphones for recording audio.
Specifications:
Display
Size: 0.5’’ – Resolution 72 x 32 – Type PMOLED
Camera
DUAL 15MP (Sony IMX147 1/2.3”), F2.0
Sensors
Gyro, Accelerometer
Connectivity
BT 4.0, WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, NFC
Memory
RAM 1GB, Flash 8GB
Processor
1Ghz Dual-Core
Battery
1350 mAh
OS
Tizen
IP
IP68 (Waterproof with Housing), IP53 (without Housing)
MicroSD
Yes
Gear 360 Manager
Just like Samsung’s Gear smartwatches, you need a manager app to use the Gear 360. Gear 360 Manager can be downloaded from Samsung’s Galaxy Apps store. The app comes in two parts – one gets installed on the camera and the other on your mobile device. The videos you shoot are available on your phone right away, with a dedicated section in the app that shows all your recorded videos. Unfortunately, this only works if your mobile device is connected to the 360.
Just like Samsung’s Gear smartwatches, the Gear 360 needs a manager app to work. Gear 360 Manager can be downloaded from the Galaxy Apps store. Gear 360 Manager comes in two parts – one installed on the Gear 360 and the other on your mobile device. The videos you shoot will be available on your device right away, along with a section that shows all your recorded content. Unfortunately this only works if your mobile device is connected to the 360. The app’s home screen gives you the usual options that we have seen in other manager apps from Samsung, with the settings menu used for updating the app and controlling options like location tags, auto correcting angle, resizing/saving pictures in apps, adding logos to videos, sound, and battery status.
Pressing the mode button gets you four options: Video, Photo, Time Lapse, and Video Looping. Some of you are probably aware of what these modes mean, but we’ll discuss them in detail for those who aren’t.
Video
Naturally, you will be using the Gear 360 mostly for shooting 360-degree videos. The best thing about video mode is that the user interface is the same as your phone. It’s handy to use and feels familiar right away. There are numerous options available: HDR (no automatic HDR option), white balance, brightness, timer, ISO, and resolution. Advanced options include sharpness, windcut, location, auto correct, resize, and the ability to add logos. As mentioned above, you can also change a few sound and LED settings.
The videos you record are quite good in quality, except for one problem – stitching. Stitching basically means you will see a line where the output from the two lenses has been combined together. This stitching isn’t visible when you view the videos on the Gear VR since the headset doesn’t offer such a high resolution, but you will notice the stitching on your mobile device.
Tip, put your sound off.
Photo
The photo mode in the Gear 360 does exactly what the name suggests – take 360-degree photos. The photos can be taken in 30-megapixel (7776×3888) or 14-megapixel resolutions (5376×2688). Adjusting resolution requires both the lenses to be on, otherwise it isn’t possible. The rest of the photo settings are the same as those for the video mode. What we missed is an option to save photos in RAW format and the option to select the shutter speed. The former is especially important because you can edit the photos to your own liking using advanced image editing tools. Just imagine how cool would it be in 360-degree photos, if you could do something like capture the light trails of cars on a busy intersection?
Here are a few photos we took with the Gear 360.
Please download our samples here.
Time Lapse
The Gear 360 is capable of making time lapse videos (photos aren’t supported yet). It’s quite the cool feature with a 360-degree camera, only you need the time and space to do so and might not use the mode much as a result. You get the same settings as the video mode, with an additional option for choosing between seven interval settings and three resolutions (3840×1920, 2560×1280, and 1920×960).
Video Looping
The last shooting mode in the Gear 360 is video looping, and this is the mode that is least likely to be used by most users. With this feature your videos will be shot at maximum resolution; you can set a recording time of 5, 30, 60 or unlimited minutes. With video looping, the Gear 360 starts recording over your existing videos once it runs out of storage space, so you have to be very careful with this mode.
Gear 360 Action Director
Together with the Gear 360, Samsung is launching the Gear 360 Action Director video editing program for Windows, which lets you edit both normal and 360 videos. The program is user-friendly but has limited options, with somewhat long loading times whenever a video is added. A nice feature is Frameshot, which lets you extract photos from your 360 videos. You can see these here in our review as well. Overall, Action Director is a basic program; it’s completely free as you get an activation code with the Gear 360, and can be downloaded from Samsung’s support page for the Gear 360.
Conclusion
The Gear 360 is the first commercial 360-degree camera, and with a price of €349.99, it’s not that expensive. We have to be honest – in our time writing the review, we fell in love with this device more and more with each passing day. The possibilities are endless if you have the imagination for it – taking pictures of waterfalls, big mountains, the Las Vegas Strip, you name it. Then, you can let people back home experience it all like they were right there in the thick of it.
Unfortunately, it’s not all great. The combination of the output of the two cameras could do without the stitching, and the two cameras can be better calibrated. We hope an update will make the stitching seamless, and also add the option to vary shutter speed. Another thing is that this camera needs to be carried around as an extra accessory, and it would be great to see Samsung making a phone with two fisheye lenses so we could have everything in a single device.
Right now, though, if you love taking pictures, shooting videos and virtual reality, the Gear 360 is the right choice. We’ll be taking a look at the Gear 360 after three months to see how much it improves over time, and whether we like it then as much as we like it now.
Welcome to the latest edition of Wallpaper Wednesday. This week we’re focusing our attention on eight gorgeous landscape-themed backgrounds. All images are available in a QHD resolution, which is a perfect fit for the Galaxy S7, Galaxy S7 edge, Galaxy Note 5 and other flagships, but they can, of course, be used on different smartphones, too.
If any of the following images float your boat and you want to download and set one as your wallpaper, simply tap on a photo to maximise it, then click and hold to save it. Once the picture is stored locally, open up Settings, locate and select Wallpaper, then just tap the newly-saved image to set it as your background.
Alternatively, you can download a ZIP file containing all of this week’s backdrops by hitting the Download button at the very bottom of this post.
Note: We’ve tried our best to identify the creators of all of the wallpapers featured in this week’s column. However, the images appear to lack copyright information, artist signatures or any real trace of origin. If you created a wallpaper we’ve posted and would like credit, or would rather we remove the image, kindly contact us.
AT&T subscribers will be happy to learn that their carrier is finally rolling out Marshmallow for the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S6 edge+. It’s the last major mobile network in the United States to release Marshmallow for these handsets. The updates weigh in at around 1.6GB and they are now being rolled out to the aforementioned devices over-the-air.
Both of these handsets will be bumped up to Android 6.0.1 and all of the features that are part and parcel of Marshmallow will be available to users, features like Doze mode, improved notifications experience, granular app permissions, tweaked user interface, and more. The security patch level will be brought up to June 1, 2016. Those who own the Galaxy Note 5 or the Galaxy S6 edge+ on AT&T will receive an update notification soon if they haven’t already got one. They can also try to grab the update by going to Settings » About device » Software update on their device.
Samsung and Apple are both competing in the mobile payments market with Samsung Pay and Apple Pay, yet both of them have different strategies. Apple sees its mobile payments service as a source of revenue. It’s believed to charge merchants around 0.15 percent of the transaction value in the United States while Samsung asks for no such payment from its partners. Samsung doesn’t see Samsung Pay as a new revenue stream, at least not yet.
The company considers Samsung Pay to be an engine that drives sales for its smartphones. The idea is to help people get more out of their phones, to make them fall in love with them so that they always stick to the Samsung ecosystem, and Samsung Pay is gradually becoming an integral part of that ecosystem. “We’re a hardware company, and at the end of the day I think what we’re trying to do is get people who hold (one of) our phones and use it … to just love it more,” Elle Kim, Global Vice President of Samsung Pay, told Reuters.
Samsung is slowly expanding its payment service to more markets across the globe. It launched in three new markets over the past three weeks, is already available in China and the United States, and has processed more than $1 billion in transactions in South Korea ever since it was launched there last year. It’s going to launch the service in markets like the United Kingdom, Canada, and Brazil later this year. Samsung is also planning to eventually offer the payment service on its virtual reality headset.
Samsung has announced the launch of a new initiative today called Samsung Creators which is going to help filmmakers generate VR content so that next-generation storytelling can be accelerated. The company will partner with storytellers to generate content for multiple audiences and a variety of channels to showcase the public that it’s easy to create VR content with Samsung VR technology. “We want to bring the power of VR technology directly to the people,” said Samsung Electronics America’s Chief Marketing Officer Marc Mathieu.
Samsung Creators initiative will host seminars and classes at VidCon and beyond, initially putting its VR technology in the hands of popular filmmakers, influencers, and YouTubers. It’s working with YouTuber Casey Neistat to showcase emerging YouTubers and to push the boundaries of 360-degree storytelling. A competition will be launched next month to challenge aspiring filmmakers and creators to develop virtual reality and 360-degree content using Samsung’s products. Ten winners will be chosen from different categories that include music, auto, tech, gaming, travel, fashion, and others. More information about the competition is available on Samsung Creators website.
Samsung has made a string of virtual reality related announcements today at VidCon. It announced the official launch of the Gear 360 camera for customers in the United States, this is the first time that people in the country can buy this camera which was first unveiled at MWC 2016. The company is also making it easier for people to share the 360-degree videos they shoot with the Gear 360.
It has renamed Samsung Milk VR to simply Samsung VR and it’s now allowing user-generated content to be uploaded to the service. This means that not only can users share their 360-degree videos to Facebook and Twitter, they can also share them to Samsung VR. The company wants to make the shooting and sharing process as simple as possible and wants to create an “end-to-end VR ecosystem” within its products. Only brands and content partners could previously upload content to Milk VR. The Gear 360 costs $349 and it gets a limited release in the United States tomorrow.
Samsung unveiled the Gear 360 camera back at the Mobile World Congress earlier this year and today it finally confirmed how much the camera is going to cost and when it’s going to be available for purchase in the United States. The Gear 360 is only getting a limited release at this point in time so many customers in the country will have to wait a while to find out more information about the wider launch.
The company has confirmed that the Gear 360 costs $349.99 for customers in the United States and that it’s only going to be available for purchase “on a limited basis” at Vidcon which starts off in Anaheim tomorrow. Those who want one but can’t make it to Anaheim tomorrow can try asking a friend to help them out or else they will have to wait until Samsung reveals information on when the Gear 360 will be available from retailers across the country.
Since the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge launched with gorgeous AMOLED displays, Samsung’s sticking to success with the Galaxy Note 7. A new report says that Samsung will remain with the same 3 OLED source suppliers for the upcoming Galaxy Note 7 that it employed for the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge: Samsung SDI, The Dow Chemical Company, and Idemitsu Kosan, with these three companies together supplying the green, red, and blue materials for AMOLED display production. This also indicates that Samsung does intend to stick with a Quad HD panel (1440p) for the next Galaxy, and a new report confirms as much.
The Galaxy Note 7, following in the footsteps of the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, will have the best display on the market — not just because of its display material but also the new dual-edge curved design. The Galaxy Note 7 edge, the current device moniker, will prove to be the first dual-edge Galaxy Note device in Samsung’s lineup.
According to a report from GSMHelpDesk, Samsung will launch the Galaxy Note 7 with a 5.8-inch QHD dual-edge curved Super AMOLED, a higher clocked variant of the Exynos 8 processor, a whopping 6GB of RAM, an improved 12-megapixel camera with dual-pixel phase-detection autofocus along with some new camera features, and a 4,000 mAh battery. The report also states that the South Korean smartphone giant will launch the device in the first week of August, and its in-store availability in Netherlands will be somewhere around the second or third week of the month.
