The Gear S2 might be the first good smartwatch Samsung has made. And this is a company that's made a lot of smartwatches.



Samsung started off in wearables with the Galaxy Gear, which was pretty terrible, and followed it up with a series of Gear watches that showed steady, but marginal improvement. They'd never quite reached a point where I could tell somebody "No, you won't regret forking over your hard-earned cash for one of those." In fact, I'd actively discourage people from getting any of them, with the closest I could recommend being the still-pretty-bad Gear Live running Android Wear.

But now I'm conflicted. I spent a good 45 minutes with the Samsung Gear S2 ahead of Thursday's event, and I came away more impressed than I've ever been by any smartwatch, and I'm one of the weirdos that's owned a few (Pebble, Pebble Steel, Samsung Gear Live, Moto 360, and Apple Watch). Well, really anybody with a smartwatch is an outlier right now, but it's devices like the Gear S2 that will help to change that.

I had this same conflicted struggle with the Samsung Galaxy S6. I knew from the first instant that I picked one up that I wanted one, especially the edge model. It was a weird feeling. I've wanted, nay, lusted after gadgets before, even smartphones. I'm very familiar with the "I want this" feeling.

But I'd never had that thought about a Samsung device before. I'd long regarded them with alternating waves of scorn and derision, mocking their penchant for badly copying designs of others, falling flat on their faces when trying their own design language. I'd laughed at their build quality, their software quality, and their marketing. Samsung was the company I loved to hate.

That started to turn when I picked up that Galaxy S6. It was finely crafted, it was beautiful, and it felt good in my hand. The performance was remarkable and the user interface tweaks they'd made didn't make me throw up in my mouth. It was a device that I wanted, and it had the Samsung name on it. It was an odd mental predicament in which I found myself.

So I bought the Galaxy S6 edge when it came out. I've been using it ever since, and while the "this thing is incredible" sheen has worn off, I'm still quite satisfied with it. I've toyed around with other Android phones (and still carry an iPhone in addition to the S6 on a daily basis), but I keep coming back to it. I'm used to it being a Samsung device and being something I want to use. The Note 5 is a quite nice device too, but Samsung still sucked at wearables.