Gear Fit 2 review: Samsung's $179 fitness band/smartwatch improves upon the original with built-in GPS, makes top-tier Fitbits look outdated
Samsung's $179 Gear device improves upon the first and should make others sweat. — It has been a couple of years since Samsung upgraded …
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's wearable push had been telegraphed for weeks: a hands-on earlier in June detailed the $179 Gear Fit2's GPS, heart-rate tracking, and 4GB storage alongside the $199 Gear IconX earbuds. This review is the verdict on that hardware — and it lands hard, arguing the built-in GPS alone makes top-tier Fitbits look outdated.
The verdict also set the template for what came after: Samsung kept iterating this line through the Gear Sport, whose reviewers flagged thin third-party apps and a useless S Voice assistant, before graduating to the Galaxy Watch and eventually splitting the lineup into a basic Galaxy Fit band and the $200 Watch Active.
First-order effects
- Fitbit's premium bands are directly undercut on features: at $179, the Gear Fit 2 ships built-in GPS that reviewers say makes Fitbit's top-tier trackers look outdated, forcing a feature-parity response.
- Buyers get a hybrid category — part fitness band, part smartwatch — that collapses the choice between a tracker and a full watch at the sub-$200 price point.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's own follow-ups expose the trade-off it accepted: the Gear Sport and Galaxy Watch reviews repeatedly ding Tizen's app library and assistants (S Voice, then Bixby), so hardware leadership keeps getting taxed by software gaps competitors can attack.
- The companion Gear IconX earbuds show Samsung bundling wearables into an ecosystem play — band plus earbuds plus phone — raising the bar from single-device comparisons to platform comparisons.
Third-order effects
- If the cadence holds, the band category gets absorbed into a tiered watch lineup: by 2019 Samsung was selling a basic Galaxy Fit alongside the simpler $200 Watch Active, with health sensing (blood pressure tracking) as the differentiator rather than step counts.
- The durable lesson across every review in this arc is that in wearables, sensors and displays commoditize fast while software ecosystems decide loyalty — a structural disadvantage for any vendor whose platform lacks third-party gravity.
The trend: Samsung's wearables are climbing from fitness bands into a tiered smartwatch family on Tizen, where each hardware leap raises the stakes on the software ecosystem that still lags.