Samsung has revealed that it doesn’t use Android or Tizen for the Samsung Gear Fit sports band.
When Samsung announced the Samsung Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo at MWC in February, the South Korean company revealed its second-generation smartwatches would run on Tizen OS rather than Android.
The original Samsung Galaxy Gear was an Android smartwatch, but Samsung decided to swap to its in-house Tizen platform for the latest smartwatches.
However, it seems the Samsung Gear Fit fitness tracker uses another operating system entirely – a real-time operating system (RTOS).
“It’s a much simpler OS and it helps keep the battery life three to four days whereas Gear 2 is [about] two days,” said Seshu Madhavapeddy, Senior VP of Product and Technology at Samsung Telecommunications America to CNET.
An RTOS is a far simpler OS than Android, Tizen or iOS and is dedicated to a very specific set of tasks, enabling it to process data without delay.
This means despite the Gear Fit’s smaller memory and slower processor, it can still last longer than the Gear 2 and still competently process all your fitness tasks.
The Gear Fit is focused on features like heart rate monitoring and step counting, so RTOS will allow the device to display more accurate and timely data.
However, this more simplistic OS means there will not be a vast app ecosystem for the fitness tracker, because it can’t release a separate SDK for the Gear Fit.
Instead, Samsung released an SDK that lets developers customise their Android apps to work with Gear Fit, rather than being able to make apps directly for the device itself.
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