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  • Anonymous Blowhard - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link

    > Samsung makes a point of noting that there is no way to return to Android once the Galaxy Gear has been updated to Tizen.

    Not *exactly* true ... there is a way to go back, but it's not easy and there's a brick risk.

    Also expect a significant gain in battery life from XDA reports.
  • teddyboyd - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link

    Samsung makes great smartwatches in the market, one of the top rated based on consumer satisfaction (see http://www.topreport.org/wearable/ for example...)
  • name99 - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link

    "Beyond new apps and features, Samsung is promising that the move to Tizen brings significant increases in battery life "

    So they promise longer battery life, but don't give any actual numbers. That's a good sign, right?
  • inighthawki - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link

    You mean 'significant' isn't a number?
  • Anonymous Blowhard - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link

    Serious salt required, but I've read reports of 2-3 days battery life out of the original Gear after a Tizen flash.
  • haukionkannel - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link

    Is that the reason behind the thing that Samsung phones does not last longer, even they have quite big power-shell?
    They don't want to optimize their Android devices, so that Tizen looks better... No cant be... I am just paranoid, or am I?
  • ruggia - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link

    well, do Galaxy phones gain significant battery life when they are loaded with custom roms?
    even more than LG/HTC/Moto phones get when they are flashed?
  • Alexey291 - Saturday, July 26, 2014 - link

    and the answer is (in my experience with S2 and S4) is no not really
  • quadrivial - Monday, July 21, 2014 - link

    Tizen UI is based on the Enlightnment Foundation Libraries (the designer of them works for Samsung). EFL is written in C instead of Java eliminating a lot of inefficiencies. EFLs primary usage is in embedded systems where Android's bloated, inefficient libraries simply won't run. Despite this, EFL has a modern OpenGL ES2.0 compositor and support for wayland. In addition, the EFL evas canvas engine lazy renders so it avoids rendering a lot of what cannot be seen (a large performance boost here too).

    The rest is probably down to driver optimizations and streamlining the normal linux stack a bit.
  • jed22281 - Wednesday, July 23, 2014 - link

    Much of the OS core & stock/native apps are EFL, but they ditched EFL as their primary dev env. in favour of HTML5 ages ago now. It was all rather odd at the time, Raster (the creator of EFL who's one of the main drivers of Tizen since before it was Tizen) was not happy.
  • tomj-northwestusa-com - Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - link

    I feel somewhat burned now that I purchased a Galaxy Gear 1 sm-v700

    I purchased it because it ran Google Android. I figured as Android updates come out, I would have the ability of update the Android operating system on my smart watch. O how wrong I was ....

    Not only are there no longer any Android updates for my watch, Samsung is dropping the Android operating system on the Galaxy Gear 1 sm-v700 smart watch and changing over to Tizen which is a private operating system does not support the google app store.

    --- I am holding out for somebody to port Android Wear to the Samsung Galaxy Gear 1 sm-v700 smart watch. I know you can get Null_ rom running on it for a full functional Android. But I will hold out and wait for Android Wear - or simply just toss my Galaxy Gear 1 sm-v700 in the round-file next to all of my other old worthless electronics I have collected over the years.... And - buy a watch made by somebody else.
  • jameskatt - Saturday, July 26, 2014 - link

    Go Samsung! By using Tizen, Samsung is finally growing up and taking control of its own destiny and not simply being the evil copyist.

    Of course, the stronger Tizen is, the weaker Google is. But then, Google seeks to castrate Samsung by forcing all Android licensees to use only generic Android UI. The Android wars continue.

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