Samsung galaxy gear rumours

Taking on the iWatch
Samsung Galaxy Gear will hit store shelves soon
The new Galaxy Gear Smartwatch will be
available in stores on September 25 in more than
100 countries.
However, the U.S. and Japan have to wait until
October to get their hands on the new device.
Pricing for the new device has come in at £299/
$299 for the U.K. and U.S.
Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch unveiled
Samsung finally revealed its much-anticipated
smartwatch at IFA 2013 . Samsung’s CEO, JK
Shin, brandished the new smartwatch during an
unpacking event on September 4.
The newest device from the maker’s of the
Galaxy Note 3 will display notifications, allow
users to answer calls to their phones and record
videos, all from your wrist.
The Galaxy Gear will run the latest version of
Android 4.3 and comes chocked full of popular
apps like Evernote, Path and Runkeeper.
Galaxy Gear comes in a variety of colors
including Rose Gold, Jet Black, Wild Orange,
Oatmeal Beige, and Mocha Gray.
Samsung hopes to get a headstart on the long-
rumored Apple iWatch and give the recently
announced Sony Smartwatch 2 a run for its
money.
Read more about the new Galaxy Gear
smartwatch .
Here’s a look at all of the news and rumors we
compiled leading up to the reveal of the Galaxy
Gear.
As the great smartwatch battle looms on the
horizon, one big upcoming combatant is
Samsung. The South Korean tech giant is looking
at the area of wrist-based wearables and has its
device ready to go.
Right now we know that the watch is called the
Samsung Galaxy Gear, which Samsung confirmed
after a recent trademark filing outed the name.
We also know a few things about the
smartwatch’s features, which currently suggest
the Gear is really looking to bring the smartphone
experience to the wrist. So what else has
Samsung got in store?
Watch along as Samsung announces the Galaxy
Gear, among other tech bits and pieces:
Samsung Galaxy Gear release date
The Samsung Galaxy Gear will touch down on
September 4 at IFA 2013 – that’s a fact
confirmed by Lee Young-hee , executive vice
president of Samsung’s mobile business.
The watch will be unveiled alongside the Galaxy
Note 3, which is also confirmed to be arriving at
Samsung’s Unpacked: Episode 2 event.
An IFA launch will put it ahead of Apple’s own
rumoured foray into the wearable domain, the
iWatch , though just behind Sony which launched
the Sony Smartwatch 2 in June.
As for when we’ll see the Gear on the market,
one insider reckons it will arrive on the last week
of September .
Samsung Galaxy Gear features and specs
That’s all well and good but what will the Galaxy
Gear bring to our lives? Again, a lot of this has
come out in the discovered trademarks.
The most recent of which describes “wearable
digital electronic devices in the form of a
wristwatch, wrist band or bangle capable of
providing access to the Internet and for sending
and receiving phone calls, electronic mails and
messages.”
However it seems the watch will act as more of
a secondary device to your smartphone and
won’t actually be able to make calls on its own.
Instead it will connect to your phone or tablet via
Bluetooth and NFC.
We also have reason to believe that it’ll be going
big on the fitness angle too , which isn’t hugely
surprising given that this is where the iWatch is
also believed to be heading.
Earlier this year we reported on some leaked
screens that claimed to belong to the Gear. While
they show off a very Windows Phone 8-like tile
interface, we’d say it looks like more of a custom
Samsung OS. This could throw a bit of water on
the Android fire, though it could also be Android
in a fancy new suit.
Note the icons too: that folded paper looks very
much like a map to us, and GPS is one feature
we’re very much expecting to see in the
onslaught of smartwatches.
Oddly, one of the screens refers to the watch as
the Samsung Galaxy Altius. However this was
also the Galaxy S4 ‘s codename, so we’d say it’s
unlikey to be what Samsung’s naming its watch.
As for the specs, a recent report reckons the
Gear is opting for a 2.5-inch square OLED
display . We also hear that the Gear could feature
a Exynos 4212 SoC along with 1GB of RAM.
Samsung Galaxy Gear design and specs
With all things wearable, form is as important as
function, and some information on the Gear’s
design has also been outed over the past few
weeks.
First, we’re hearing that the watch will come in
five colours. It will be available in white, orange,
grey and black from the last week of September,
and in gold a week after that.
Some sketches published in the same Galaxy-
outing trademark hinted at what Samsung might
have had in mind and the fact the design
included a flexible display immediately grabbed
our attention.
However these hopes were later dashed by
Samsung, which confirmed that a flexible screen
is not going to feature just yet. Sorry about that.
Then came some leaked pictures of what was
claimed to be a prototype version of the watch,
but some insiders then came out to say that the
final version revealed at IFA will look different to
this.
Samsung Galaxy Gear: Android for your arm?
Until recently, we’d understood that the Samsung
Gear was a name the company was floating for
its wearable. But now we know that it will be
named the Galaxy Gear, that new middle name
could be a key indicator of what will be on offer.
First, this means the Gear could be slotting into
Samsung’s Galaxy ecosystem, which makes
perfect sense if the watch will be communicating
with our smartphones and tablets.
Plus it would also suggest that Samsung could
be opting for an Android operating system, given
that this is the software that binds its Galaxy
devices together.
Gears sent out to developers have reportedly
been running on either an Android 4.1 or 4.2
interface , but we’re now hearing that it will in
fact come packing a version of Android 4.3.
How close this imitates the full phone Android
experience remains to be seen, but we’d expect it
to have been chopped up and remolded a bit for
the diminutive display.
The same source to claim an Android appearance
also said that Samsung will offer a watch app for
phones and tablets that will communicate with
the Gear instantaneously. This means if you’re
halfway through reading a message on your
wrist, you can switch to your phone and it will
pick up exactly where you left off.