Wow that's a lot. Let's see if I can come up with some answers..
1. I hear that battery drain is a known bug when connected to the HTC one. Not sure why it happens but it's been reported for mostly that device.
Strange indeed. Could be related to the Sense flavour of BT stack. I have a spare Google device (Galaxy Nexus), will try the Gear with it to see if the battery drain issue is cured.
2. I'm pretty sure in order to use the Bluetooth earpiece with the Gear you need to connect the gear to your phone, go into Settings on your Gear 2, Go into Bluetooth, and connect it there so instead of having both attached to the phone, you have it Phone>Gear>Bluetooth (IE NOT Bluetooth>Phone<Gear|)
According to the process described
here, the audio device needs to be paired with the phone and not the Gear, while the Gear is somehow able to make the phone switch between the phone audio coming through it to the earpiece. There is also
this video describing how it works from the user perspective.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work this way with my HTC One M8. It looks like it uses ONLY the "Phone Audio" profile while connected to the Gear, which effectively disables any other device relying on the same profile (e.g. the earpiece) to connect to the phone. If, nevertheless, you force the phone to connect to the earpiece, the Gear gets disconnected. I suspect, on Samsung devices, a different BT protocol (probably BLE) is used for communicating to the Gear, so it can stay connected to the phone while the "Phone Audio" is taken by another device. This could also explain the power drain above, as BLE is supposed to be much more energy efficient. The question is, of course, how to make HTC One to use it (BLE is obviously supported by the device).
It is possible to connect my earpiece to the Gear, but only as media device (my earpiece supports this profile as well). In that case it can be used for listening to music played on the Gear. But it doesn't help in the phone call scenario. In any case, the "transfer to earpiece" operation described in both tutorials (you can see the corresponding icon on the right side of the Gear screen in the video above) is not available, no matter if the earpiece is paired to the phone or paired/connected to the Gear directly (the icon is greyed out).
Again, I'll try to put a custom BLE-enabled ROM on my Galaxy Nexus (standard ROMs don't enable BLE on that device, despite the fact the hardware is present) to see if it behaves any differently.
3. Samsung Apps store is not available on NON Samsung devices.
This is true, but there are good people around who can make them available for outsiders like us... The problem is Runtastic app for Gear 2 or Fit (not to be confused with Gear 1) is not available yet, according to Runtastic themselves, and no ETA so far. This is despite Samsung press releases. Had I known this before buying my Gear, I would have given it second thought...
4. This is true and many people are looking for a fix. Nothing can be changed right now.
This is particularly annoying. What I really don't understand is why any other app notifications do get to the Gear, but alarms (even from 3rd party apps) don't. I'm completely baffled by that!
