Samsung introduced Galaxy Gear, its very first smartwatch as an accessory to the Galaxy Note 3 in IFA event held at Berlin. At the time of its release, the Galaxy Gear worked only with Galaxy Note 3, but Samsung recently rolled out the Android 4.3 update for Galaxy S4, Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 to make the device compatible with these devices.
This interesting and beautiful little gadget works and looks like as a watch, not only that, also packs some features of a smartphone. In case you don’t know, let me tell you. The device sports a 1.63 inch Super AMOLED dispaly with 320 x 320 resolution. It has got an 800 MHz Exynos CPU running inside along with a RAM of 512 MB. On board it has 4 GB storage capacity. The device boasts off a beautiful 1.9 MP camera on the strap that is capable of recording videos upto 720p. Under the hood it has got a 315 mAh battery. Samsung installed some apps in the device, the device also features Samsung apps that allows you install the apps compatible with the Galaxy Gear.
Since it is a small gadget with limited features, it may not be considered wrong to think that it will be hard to play with the device beyond the boundaries. Ever wondered while owning a Galaxy Gear that you can add charm to the functionality of this small machine by having play store on the device, flash different mods or flash custom ROMs ? Well, all this is possible on a device, but requires root access and the good news is, Galaxy Gear has been rooted by the awesome guys at XDA-developers.
In the following post, we’re going to have a look on the method to root the Galaxy Gear. Before we begin, here are some pre-requisites to follow.
- You must have the Samsung USB drivers installed. Download Here.
- The method will only work on a Windows PC. Do not try this on any other PC.
- You must have a Galaxy Gear compatible device, e.g a Galaxy Note 3, Note 2, S4 or S3.
- Bypass the Activation Screen on the Galaxy Gear. To do so, on your Galaxy Gear compatible phone head to Settings > Enable NFC. Now touch and hold the charging dock of the Galaxy Gear to the back of the Galaxy Gear compatible device, the one you enabled NFC on and wait for it to install Gear Manager.
- Follow the prompts on the phone while the installation process finishes, and the Gear passes the activation process.
- Enable USB debugging mode on the Galaxy Gear. To do so, on the Galaxy Gear go to Settings > Gear Info > Enable USB Debugging mode.
- Connect your Galaxy Gear to the PC and let it install the drivers for your device.
Here is how you can root the Galaxy Gear:
- Once again make sure that you installed the Samsung USB drivers and enabled USB debugging mode on your Galaxy Gear, and connect it to the PC.
- You need Cydia Impactor now. Download it here and then extract on your desktop.
- Open the Impactor.exe file from the extracted Cydia Impactor folder.
- After you’ve opened the Impactor.exe file, you should see # drop SuperSU su to /system/xbin/su in the text field now. Hit start button now. If the field is empty, then copy it from here and paste it there and hit start.
- After you hit start, it will prompt for connection permissions. Click on always allow and tap “OK” on your Galaxy Gear.
- Close the popup on PC and click start again.
- Download SuperSu apk and place it on your desktop. Download it here.
- Download and install Wondershare Mobile Go (Trial version will work fine) – Get it here.
- Open Wondershare after installing it and click on Google Play Apps in wondershare.
- Search and install SuperSu (Free by Chainfire).
- In case this doesn’t work, follow this: In WonderShare Mobile select your device, that you connected and click on Install Apps > Select the SuperSU APK file that you placed on your desktop and install it.
- Now find SuperSu installed on your Galaxy Gear by swiping to the apps from the home screen, after opening it, if it prompts you to update the SU binary, tap yes.
- Congrats! You’ve successfully rooted your Galaxy Gear now.
That’s all for now. In case you face any difficulties or have any queries, feel free to stop by the comment box below. We will try our best to help you out.
I have a Gear 2 on witch I tried to install a custom ROM, but connection was lost due to an unstable USB connection.
The resut was that the only thing the Gear will show on startup are two windows:
The first one tells me to download Gear Manager etc., and there are two buttons
One that says Show video and one saying Next.
When I press Next it shows a window telling me to select the Gear in Gear Manager. This window have one button saying Previous.
This means that I can’t put the Gear into USB Debug Mode, or do anything else witn it.
Do you know a way to recover a Gear 2 like that?
Regards Henrik Hummel