Samsung made waves in the wearable market this year by launching two new smartwatches and an activity tracker. Last year the company jumped on this bandwagon by launching the Galaxy Gear smartwatch alongside Galaxy Note 3. The new Gear smartwatches are a bit different, they don’t run on Android, but Samsung didn’t address one of the most criticized aspects of its wearables, the fact that they don’t officially support non-Samsung devices. Though it turns out that the Gear Fit activity tracker is actually compatible with the likes of HTC One M8, Nexus 5 and more.
Like the new smartwatches, the Gear Fit is also only supposed to be compatible with the company’s own devices. There’s a simple workaround to make it work with non-Samsung Android devices. By sideloading necessary apps and then pairing Gear Fit through Bluetooth, one doesn’t need a Samsung phone to tap into the features of Gear Fit.
Most of the functions work fine, but alarm notifications and quick reply options don’t. There were bound to be a few limitations, but given that this doesn’t completely cripple functionality, it won’t be completely useless if you’re willing to use the activity tracker with a non-Samsung device. The device that it is paired to must be running Android 4.3 or higher.
Samsung’s new wearable devices went on sale alongside Galaxy S5 on April 11th.
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