Hands-on: Samsung's $179 Gear Fit2 band and $199 Gear IconX wireless earbuds have heart-rate tracking, 4GB storage; Gear Fit2 has GPS and arrives June 10
Timothy Torres / PC Magazine :
Context & Ripple Effects
This hands-on lands days after SamMobile's spec rundown of the Gear Fit2 — the 1.55-inch AMOLED screen, Tizen OS 2.3, and water resistance — confirming the $179 price and the June 10 ship date. The companion piece is the Gear IconX, which puts heart-rate tracking and 4GB of onboard storage into wireless earbuds rather than a wristband.
The pairing matters because it shows Samsung attacking fitness tracking from two form factors at once. Ars Technica's subsequent Gear Fit2 review found the built-in GPS made top-tier Fitbits look outdated, while Tom's Guide's IconX review praised the sound and tracking accuracy but flagged bad battery life.
First-order effects
- Fitbit's premium bands are directly undercut on features: a $179 rival with built-in GPS arrives June 10, removing the phone-tethering requirement that defined the category.
- Buyers get a cable-free workout setup — the IconX stores music locally and tracks heart rate in the ear, so runners can leave both phone and watch behind.
Second-order effects
- The IconX's criticized battery life forces a redesign cycle: by October 2017 Samsung returns with a $200 second-gen IconX bundled alongside the $300 Gear Sport watch, repricing the line upward.
- Rivals in the band market must respond to GPS-at-$179 as table stakes rather than a differentiator, compressing the feature gap between budget bands and smartwatches.
Third-order effects
- If the annual refresh cadence holds, the sprawling Gear experiment — band, earbuds, watch — gets rationalized into a simpler lineup, which is where Samsung lands by early 2019 with the basic Galaxy Fit band and the $200 Galaxy Watch Active.
- Wearables consolidate around fitness-first devices with phone-free features (GPS, local storage) as the core purchase driver, pushing pure notification-watches toward the low end.
The trend: Samsung is iterating fitness wearables on an annual cadence, using the Gear band-and-earbud experiments to converge on a simplified Galaxy-branded wearable line.