Samsung Gear S3 review: durable, great battery life, sharp display, but slow raise to wake response, still the best watch for Android users
Cam Bunton / Pocket-lint :
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after The Verge's Gear S2 review praised the design but dinged its slow voice controls and limited app selection on Tizen, Pocket-lint's Gear S3 verdict repeats the pattern in stronger hardware terms: durability, battery life, and display all improve, while the raise-to-wake lag becomes the new software complaint.
The verdict matters because it crowns Samsung's Tizen watch as the default pick for Android users at exactly the moment the line's recurring weaknesses — thin third-party apps and a weak assistant — are being carried forward rather than fixed.
First-order effects
- Android users shopping for a smartwatch get a clear buy recommendation, with the trade explicitly priced in: best-in-class battery and display against a sluggish wake gesture and the same limited app catalog the Gear S2 had.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's successors inherit the critique rather than escaping it — the Gear Sport review again flags few third-party apps and a useless S Voice, and the later Galaxy Watch review swaps in a 'terrible' Bixby — meaning each generation must win on hardware alone.
Third-order effects
- If the app gap persists unaddressed across three generations of Tizen watches, Samsung's wearable line structurally competes as premium hardware on a closed platform while its Android partner's ecosystem remains one step removed — leaving the assistant layer, not the watch face, as the battleground where Samsung keeps losing to Apple's integration.
The trend: Samsung's Tizen smartwatches are iterating rapidly on hardware while the software weaknesses — third-party app scarcity and underpowered assistants — recur unchanged across every generation from the Gear S2 to the Galaxy Watch.