JOHN DAVIDSON

The Galaxy S5 phone might have been Samsung’s biggest announcement at Mobile World Congress, but it was a much smaller device that made the biggest impression: Samsung’s Gear Fit.

The fitness band, designed primarily to be worn on the wrist, easily has the brightest, most colourful screen ever to be included in such a device – for what it’s worth, Samsung says the screen is the world’s first 1.84-inch curved Super AMOLED display – and it does far more than your typical fitness bands do, too.

The Gear Fit counts your steps and monitors your sleep like most of its competitors, but it also has a heart rate sensor built into it (another first), allowing it to be used as a sort of impersonal personal trainer, vibrating whenever your pulse rate drops below some threshold you have set for yourself, to warn you to speed up or try harder. And it has a stopwatch and a timer, which many of its competitors lack.

More than that, it uses Bluetooth to attach back to your smartphone quite like a smartwatch, allowing it to show you an almost complete range of notifications from the phone. You can’t accept or make a call with the device, the way you can with Samsung’s Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo smartwatches, but you can reject calls, view incoming emails, texts and social media feeds, and control what music is playing back on the phone. You can even look at your calendar, all without ever pulling out your phone.

While it doesn’t run Tizen, the new Samsung operating system that runs the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo, the Gear Fit does have an operating system capable of running apps, meaning that new features could be added to the device over time.

In short, the new fitness band does many of the things the smartwatches do, but it does it in a much more appealing, much easier to wear package. The device can even be popped out of its rubber band, allowing it to be added, say, to a clip that attaches to your clothing, or to a choker so you can wear it around your neck, though of course the heart rate sensor may not work when it’s worn like that.

The only thing really wrong with the Gear Fit is that, for the moment at least, the screen is incapable of modifying its orientation to account for how it’s being worn. When you wear it on the top of your wrist, for instance, the icons and text in the user interface face the wrong direction, and can be hard to read without twisting your arm in a most unnatural fashion. You have to wear it with the screen on the underside of your wrist if you want to read it easily. But the designer of the user interface, who is here at Mobile World Congress, said she was “looking into” getting the UI to re-orient itself depending on which way the device is facing, in much the same way a tablet goes from landscape mode to portrait mode depending on how it’s being held.

Pricing has yet to be announced, but it should be significantly cheaper than the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo, too. Unless you want to make calls and take photos with your wearable computer, the Gear Fit looks like a better alternative.