Gear S2 won't do what it's told

virtuouskate

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Oct 7, 2013
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I have a T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S6 running *shudder* Nougat, and I just bought a brand-new, still-in-the-box-sealed-shut, not used or refurbished or open-box, Samsung Gear S2 (not the classic, the one with the smooth silver face and white silicon wristband). All was well for the first day other than the fact that the battery life kind of sucks. (Previously I'd had an original Gear Fit, the bulky horizontal rectangle, not the Gear Fit 2 that came in colors with the vertical screen readout, and was used to charging about once every 3 days. This one hovers around 60% when I get up in the morning, so I'm charging it daily.)

I personalized the watch and settings to suit my needs--I really don't need my wristwatch interrupting a doctor's appointment to tell me I just got an email from Best Buy saying the watch I was already wearing had been delivered--but the watch doesn't seem to follow directions very well. It distracts me when I'm driving with notifications that I received an email, but 1) It's always an email from 2-3 days ago that I've already read on my phone and possibly deleted, and 2) I set it up not to notify me about emails. I manually sync my email on my phone, so it's not like it's notifying me that my phone downloaded new emails. It just randomly shows me the sender and subject line from an old email. When I go to the app on my watch it shows I have 4 unread emails, but since these are emails I deleted two days ago, I can't get it to mark them as read and stop notifying me of them. My email is syncing correctly on my phone and those 4 "unread" emails are long gone, so I don't think it would do any good to delete the accounts from my phone and add them in again.

That was annoying enough, but today--again, while driving--my wrist vibrated unexpectedly. I was sitting still in traffic so I glanced down at it. I didn't have time to read the whole thing before the car in front of me started moving, but I saw what looked like a microphone icon like the one for S Voice except it was on a red background (it could have been the voice memo), and a long message that I didn't have time to read. The only part I caught was "could not locate John" and "notifying police." I don't have the 3G model that can make voice calls, thank goodness, but when I got to my destination, I had no notifications or voice memos. S Voice had "voice wakeup" turned on even though I turned it off the other day.

I went on about my day, and about half an hour later my wrist vibrated again. I was standing still at the time, but apparently my watch thought I was working out and was encouraging me to keep going. I got back in my car and started driving (ironically, my watch is encouraging me in my "great workout" while I'm driving to McDonald's for my Friday fast food indulgence) and about 5 minutes later my watch told me I was almost there, then congratulated me on completing my great workout of 14 minutes and 15 seconds and 1486 steps (I've gotten in more steps just grabbing a gallon of milk at the grocery store). I have no idea what triggered the belief that I was working out or how it decided that I was finished given that it was an unusual amount of time (14 minutes as opposed to, say, 15 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever) and I was sitting still (which the watch was aware of based on my step count, which had not gone up from when I got in my car) for probably 5-plus minutes while the app encouraged me to keep up the good work.

So my question is, is this situation salvageable? I'm not sure if I'm unknowingly doing things to trigger these events (I was talking to a passenger at the time that John couldn't be located, although no one said anything that sounded remotely like "locate John" or "notify police," and I had just walked a very short distance at normal speed and was standing in a park when my "great workout" started), if there's something I need to change, if I just got a defective watch, or if the watch just doesn't play well with Nougat and I need to give it up. For what it's worth, it does a perfectly good job of the tasks I bought the watch for: It tells time, keeps track of my steps, and notifies me when I have an incoming text, phone call or calendar alert. (I'm hard of hearing. If my phone isn't right in front of my face, I don't always hear it go off, and I have a desk job that involves a lot of sitting, standing, moving around and sitting back down again. I'm just more comfortable leaving my phone out of my pocket, on my desk, even if it's not always right in my line of sight. But I'm kind of known for always wearing a wristwatch, and a watch that tells me when my phone is ringing seemed like a great idea for me. As long as it doesn't call the cops every time John goes missing.) Most of my phone issues have been mostly user errors, and I don't want to return the watch just because I'm an *****.
 

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