Following its international debut at the end of August, the Samsung Gear S will soon be making its way stateside.
Samsung has announced that the Gear S will officially launch in the US on Friday, November 7. The Tizen-powered wearable will be available in both white and black colors and will be sold at AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, as well as Samsung Experience Shops in Best Buy stores.
The big feature — literally — of the Gear S is its 2-inch 480x360 Super AMOLED screen, which is one of the largest displays that we’ve seen on a wearable device. Packed underneath that big ol’ screen is a dual-core 1GHz processor, 4GB of storage, 512MB of RAM and a 300mAh battery. The Gear S’s body is IP67 certified for resistance to dust and water.
Another notable feature of the Gear S is its standalone cellular connectivity. This allows it to make calls, receive and reply to notifications and send emails without having a phone nearby.
The carriers are expected to announce their own pricing for the Gear S soon. Sprint will sell the wearable for $0 down and 24 monthly payments of $16, or a total of $384. The Gear S can be added to a Sprint Family Share Pack for $10 per month, but Sprint says that through December 2015, it’ll waive that charge when the Gear S is added to a Family Share Pack of 20GB or more.
T-Mobile says that it’ll begin sales of the Gear S on November 9, with pre-orders available starting today. Pricing for T-Mobile’s Gear S will be set at $0 down and 24 payments of $14.58 each, with a full retail price of $349.92. T-Mobile’s Gear S rate plan will cost $5 per month and will include unlimited talk and text as well as 500MB of data.
The Samsung Gear S is an interesting device for many reasons, including its big 2-inch display and its standalone cellular connectivity. The Gear S is quite a bit pricier than other smartwatches on the market, though, and so it’ll be interesting to see how consumers respond to the device, especially since the smartwatch category as a whole is still slowly gaining traction with the mainstream.
Are you thinking about buying a Samsung Gear S?
UPDATE: AT&T will sell the Samsung Gear S starting November 7 for $199.99 with a two-year contract. AT&T customers can add the Gear S to their Mobile Share plan for $10 per month.
Meanwhile, Verizon has said that it’ll sell the Gear S for $349.99.
