tl;dr The physical watch is excellent. The notifications are super useful. The applications are an absolute disgrace.Summary:I really like this watch, and I have no intention of returning it or purchasing a different one any time soon. It's really good for most of what I need it for, and it's very convenient to be able to leave my phone in my pocket 99% of the time. You can quickly check notifications, make/answer calls, send/receive texts, preview emails, make payments and more. The only downside is the terrible selection of low-quality apps.=============Build quality:The watch both looks and feels premium. The rotating bezel feels really damn good to turn and the buttons are nice and clicky. Not totally sure what material they're using for the bezel, but whatever it is, it isn't very tough. Two days in and I've already scratched it on something, though I don't remember banging it against anything. No idea how tough the screen is and I'll probably never know because the first thing I did with the watch was apply a tempered glass screen protector.=============Screen:Very responsive touchscreen! The pixel density is great - everything looks clear and sharp. The screen is plenty bright enough in my experience. You can set the display to always-on, but it's really not too hard to just pick up your wrist to check the screen. You'll save a ton of battery this way.=============Notifications:Probably my favorite feature of this watch is its ability to quickly show notifications from my phone. Essentially any notification that shows up on your phone will be pushed to your watch. This includes texts (which will also display who it's from and the body of the text), phone calls (including who its from and an option to answer or decline), emails (including the subject and a snippet of the email), alerts from Samsung Health/Pay, and well, everything else. You can customize which notifications appear and which are hidden in the Gear App (on your phone). When you clear a notification on your phone it clears it on the watch automatically and vice versa which is very nice.It's super useful to be able to check notifications at a glance without having to pull out my phone - especially as a university student where checking your phone isn't always appropriate. I also leave my phone on silent during class at and work, knowing that if someone tries to contact me my watch will vibrate letting me know. I had no idea how natural it would feel; having your wrist vibrate to notify you of a message is so much better than your pocket vibrating.Responding to messages isn't something I usually do from the watch, but I wouldn't regardless of which watch I had. Smart watch screens are just too small to be of any considerable use for that sort of thing. However, the quick responses it suggests for text messages are actually pretty close to what I'd say anyways, so I have found myself using those from time to time to answer simple questions. The voice to text feature is usable but it still way behind Google/Alexa/Siri.=============Communication / Connectivity:You can both make and receive calls and texts from the watch without ever touching your phone. The watch includes a microphone and speaker. The speaker is loud enough, and the microphone is actually pretty decent quality. Texting is basically a total PITA but I didn't expect anything else - the screen is too small to fit a keyboard.The watch has both Wifi and Bluetooth capabilities. The Bluetooth connects quickly but the range isn't super great - more of an issue with Bluetooth itself though, and not the watch. Walking to the other side of the house without my phone drops the connection, and the watch will beep/vibrate (depending on your current ringtone setting) to let you know. Wish that could be turned off completely.When I'm driving I like to have my phone connected via Bluetooth to my car's audio system. It connects automatically even when connected to my watch which is excellent. Unfortunately I've noticed a significant drop in audio quality when my phone is connected to both my watch and my car at the same time. Putting my watch on airplane mode while I'm driving fixes the quality issues, but it's really a pain. A quick search reveals other people having the same problem. No official response. Not sure if this is a problem with Bluetooth headphones as well, but I assume I might be.=============Music:I don't have Bluetooth earbuds to try out but I figure they'd work great. The watch is able to control whichever music application is running on your phone, including things like SoundCloud. It has basic media controls like Play/Pause, Previous/Next, and volume control. It even shows the thumbnail of the song in the background.=============Software:Here's where the review gets a bit sour, and this is ultimately the reason for the poor rating. The OS is terribly annoying to use sometimes. There are a ton of redundant options that barely differ, and it's often really hard to find decent descriptions (I'm looking at you, DND/Goodnight/Theater modes). Different apps and setting screens handle their layouts very differently making it not intuitive to use at all.The available app selection is both very limited and very well hated by the community. Apps usually average around 2 stars, with many below that. Samsung offers a few additional apps of their own on the store which are mostly trash. They also include a ton of useless crap on the watch out-of-the-box that you can't remove. The watch has 4GB of storage, but ships with only ~1.6GB free. Thanks for that... Now that I think about it though, the apps in the store are so bad I doubt I'll ever need to worry about running out of space.The only saving grace: Samsung Pay and Samsung Health which, like the phone versions, works very well. Paying with your watch feels super badass, though a few times I felt pretty stupid when I had to pull out my wallet after it didn't work. Win some lose some. I'm not really into health tracking, but having my heart rate charted over the course of a day is cool I guess, and seeing my step count is both depressing and... well, it's just depressing. I've also found the sleep tracking ability pretty neat.Some application settings are found on your watch, and others can/have to be changed from the Gear app on your phone. It's never very clear which can be found where, so you really have to dig around to find things. It honestly feels like a different person programmed each app and none of them did any sort of communication while they did so. Poor planning.=============Bottom line:This was a difficult review to write. I'm really torn over this watch. On one hand it's a quality product that can add a good deal of convenience to my life, but on the other hand it feels unfinished. There's a lot of work that Samsung should be doing to improve the software side of things. Until such time, I'll leave this review at 3 stars. If something changes in the future, my rating will change accordingly. At the moment, I could still recommend this watch to someone looking for a good-looking, high-quality smart watch, so long as they understand its shortcomings.