Samsung to updating Galaxy Gear this week with enhanced notifications and gestures

Those in the U.S. with a Samsung Galaxy Gear are about to receive a good bit of extra functionality with an update hitting this week. We caught a glimpse of this update when it came to European variants, and it seems the same functionality will now be making a wider release. The update is primarily focused on improving rich notification support, which at launch was limited to a handful of Samsung's own first-party apps.

Post update, the Gear will show notifications with more information from "most third party apps," Samsung claims, including Facebook, Messenger, Gmail, Hangouts, Twitter and Foursquare. Not having these notifications give any useful information in the shipping software was quite a shortcoming of the smartwatch, so we're excited to see how the feel of the Galaxy Gear improves.

Beyond notifications, the update will also improve the "Smart Relay" function, which lets the Galaxy Gear do more on its own via your connected smartphone rather than pushing functions for you to handle on the phone itself. Further, the gesture response for lifting your wrist to display the watch face has been tweaked.

Samsung tells us that the update is on its way this week, so if you've made the leap to pick up a Gear and are ready for some improvements, be on the lookout for that update through Gear Manager.