Just ahead of the Samsung Galaxy Gear release, new photos have emerged detailing the smartwatch’s design and UI. The September 4 press event for the Galaxy Gear has also been confirmed to be that of the Galaxy Note 3 smartphone, just before the kickoff of the IFA consumer electronics expo in Berlin, Germany. Smart watch’s are a product idea that has been heating up as of late, and it looks as though Samsung beat the likes of Apple to the punch in launching one.
The new photos come courtesy of a Venture Beat anonymous souce who claim the Galaxy Gear in question is a prototype that’s been sent to developers and some partners.
The photos depict an OLED display registering about 3-inches with large bulky bezels encasing it, a 4MP camera built into the strap of the tech timepiece, and that’s about it. The report does shed some light on accompanying features though doesn’t delve much into specs running underneath the hood. Rumors have pointed towards a flexible panel and will allow for finger swiping cues; however, it won’t allow for texting or typing meaning that the Galaxy Gear could act more like a notification feed to be cross-synced with other Samsung products, like the Note 3, which is further confirmed by the report.
It could run on a quite formidable dual-core 1.5GHx Exynos 4212 processor chip and Mali-400MP4 graphic processor, use Android 4.1 or 4.2 as a mobile operating system, and connect via Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC.
A few goodies mentioned by the hands-on assessment include:
- “Samsung S Voice for voice commands
- Preloaded with Android apps for social media, health tracking, etc.
- Integration with a companion Galaxy S phone or tablet
- An easy-to-use swipe function to access apps, the built-in camera, and the photo gallery
- Call logs (A cool use-case: You can initiate a call from the watch to a Samsung smartphone device)
- Internet access
- Power button on the side
- Social media integration — you can share to your Facebook or Twitter account from the watch
- 10+ hours battery life
- While you’re at the gym working out, the smartwatch can track your health data, including steps, heart rate, calorie intake.
- You can measure your heart rate at any time via a built-in heart rate monitor.
- The watch will help you devise the perfect workout — one of the first apps devised for the watch suggests workouts to help you lose weight, gain energy or tone up, for instance.
- Track your food intake by taking photos of your meals — plenty of apps are already on the market that help you keep a food diary of sorts. What would be truly innovative is if Samsung could detect the nutritional value of food, based on a smartwatch photograph.”
Smartwatches are a concept that have really yet to explode in terms of popularity but there’s plenty of room to build. Pebble has built a smartwatch that remains one of Kickstarter’s most successful crowd-funding campaigns and Apple has dropped a few hints into the rumor mill about an iWatch with similar functions to those mentioned above.
Price points and other details have yet to be confirmed but we won’t have to wait much longer as the press event kicks off Wednesday, September 4. In the meantime, let us know how you think Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch will fare in the consumer electronics realm.
[Images via Venture Beat]
