Earlier this week, some screenshots of the Gear Manager app for Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Gear smartwatch leaked out, giving us an early taste of what the company has planned for Sept. 4. Now the rumor mill has kicked things up a notch, as images of a prototype Galaxy Gear have made their way online.
VentureBeat claims to have a source that showed it a Galaxy Gear unit as well as a promotional video for the device that was put together by a marketing team working closely with Samsung. According to the report, the watch itself measures three inches diagonally and has a square OLED display, though the bezels that are above and below the screen give it a more rectangular shape.
The Galaxy Gear hardware is said to include a 4-megapixel camera that's built into the strap and can help users track their health data and food intake. Also included is Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (with Internet access), a power button on the side of the unit, speakers in the watch clasp and a battery that's estimated to last 10+ hours. On the software side of things, we're told to expect S Voice commands, social media and health tracking apps and a Call Log that will allow users to initiate a phone call on the watch and then carry on the conversation on their connected Samsung smartphone.
Samsung has
already revealed that it's got a new smartwatch in the works, and one executive
recently confirmed that the device will be shown at
its Sept. 4 event in Berlin. We'll have to wait until to find out if the watch shown in these photos is indeed the Galaxy Gear, especially since Samsung has been known to go to great lengths to keep upcoming products under wraps. The watch described in today's report certainly seems like it could be a Samsung product, though, sporting
Galaxy-esque rounded corners and several software add-ons.
What do you think of this Galaxy Gear smartwatch? Does it sound like something that you'd wear on your wrist everyday?
UPDATE: A new report from GigaOM claims to have a few more details on the Galaxy Gear. The site's sources reaffirm that the Gear shown in these leaked images is a prototype unit, going on to say that a "different, more finished" device will be shown on Sept. 4.
The final unit will reportedly be powered by Android 4.3 with its keyboard functions turned off and no built-in web browser. Notifications are said to take up the entirety of the Gear's display, with an icon on top and a couple of lines of text below it. Finally, while the Gear is expected to be able to connect to Bluetooth LE-enabled phones, users will purportedly need to pair it with a Samsung device that has a special watch app store in order to install apps onto the watch itself.
This latest report goes on to claim that the Galaxy Gear's display measures 2.5 inches in size, while the entire case comes in at 3 inches. A 1.5GHz dual-core Exynos 4212 processor will reportedly be packed inside Samsung's Galaxy Gear, and battery life is said to measure around 24 hours with "modest use" and 10 hours with heavier usage.
