It’s not as if Samsung didn’t already have a few smartwatches in its portfolio, but a standalone one is a whole different beast. With such a device, Samsung would catch up with the Chinese companies that have manufactured such devices for months now.
The whole concept of having a device around your wrist that can display various types of info exactly when you need it has been great for a while, but the products were sold to us with a major asterisk. You need to also carry around a smartphone so that the smartwatch picks up the notifications from it and displays them on its own screen. Besides that, the smart time pieces created by big names such as Sony and Samsung have only acted like remote controls for the smartphones until now, as the small gadgets from around the wrist didn’t even pack a GPS sensor for fitness tracking, for example. Things are definitely about to change if Samsung launches a standalone smartwatch, as the patent pictured below suggests.
As I mentioned before, Chinese companies have been manufacturing stand alone Android smartwatches for a few months now, and while their products are not perfect, they’re evidence that it is indeed possible to create such things.
Samsung’s standalone smartwatch might not even run Android, to begin with, as the South Korean company has been quite stubborn lately about implementing its own Tizen OS in the smartwatches it launched earlier this year, and the Gear Glass smart glasses it means to launch in the coming months. A standalone smartwatch running Tizen could make sense, as Samsung really needs something to put some distance between it and Google, who is having its own share of smartwaches with LG’s G Watch and Motorola’s Moto 360.
The standalone phone-watch made by Samsung should be able to send emails, take pictures, track the biometric data of the wearer and even include a GPS sensor for proper fitness tracking, all without the need for a companying smartphone. All of that would be great, especially if the device came with a decent price tag. There are a few concerns, though, most of them regarding the battery life of a device with such features and so many sensors, and Samsung’s history in this field has been somehow spotty. We’re waiting for the company to prove us wrong!
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