Rumor: Samsung Gear 3 launches this fall; design patents show it could have circular design
We’d be fools to think Samsung wasn’t working on another iteration of their Gear smartwatch, but it’s always nice to get confirmation (even if it is unofficial). A trusted source familiar with the matter revealed to Phandroid that Samsung is currently cooking up the Samsung Gear 3. The device is said to be running Tizen, though that’s not much of a surprise considering all but the Samsung Gear Live (an Android Wear smartwatch) are up and running on Samsung’s infant operating system.
According to our source, Samsung is planning to launch this thing in the fall. There’s no exact timing to be had, but we hear they want to get it out before their developer conference kicks off November 11th. Unfortunately that’s about all we know in terms of launch and hardware details, but recent developments could shed some light on the direction Samsung may be looking to go with this thing.
For starters, recently filed design patents (here and here) show Samsung could be looking to follow in Motorola’s footsteps and introduce a circular watch design ala the Moto 360. The patents show typical Samsung design in other areas of the smart watch, including cameras mounted on the wrist straps. There’s no guarantee any of these designs will end up being applied to the Gear 3, but it’s the most we have to go on at this point.
It’ll be interesting to see what Samsung does to transform Tizen in order to fit this form factor if this is, in fact, the design they’ll be going with. On the functional side of things our source mentions they’ll be borrowing a couple of cues from Android Wear, namely in the notifications department. Each app will have its own rich notification where it makes sense (an email notification might have a special button for a voice reply while the music app might present controls for pausing, skipping and playing, for instance).
It all makes you wonder why Samsung doesn’t just swallow their pride and embrace Android Wear for what it is and what it may become. Perhaps they just need some way to keep Tizen relevant considering they’re having trouble bringing it to market in smartphone form. We hope to hear more leading up to their first worldwide developers’ conference later this year.