Details on Samsung’s next smartwatch, referred to as the “Orbis” or Gear A, have been leaking for months now. Perhaps the most notable feature that’s been rumored is that the watch will include a round face and a rotating bezel for navigation. Well, it’s not a rumor anymore, because Samsung has straight-up confirmed it.
SamMobile was in attendance at Samsung’s Tizen Developer Summit 2015 in Bangalore, India, where the company confirmed that its upcoming round smartwatch will have a rotating bezel outside of its screen. Unfortunately, no other details about the device were shared.
The rotating bezel will reportedly offer a few different ways of navigating through the Gear A’s UI, such as scrolling through lists, changing volume, and zooming in and out. The Gear A smartwatch is also rumored to include a 1.2GHz dual-core Exynos 3472 processor, 768MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a 450mAh battery, and Samsung’s Tizen operating system.
Samsung has made quite a few smartwatches to date, but what makes the Gear A notable is that it’ll be Samsung’s first smartwatch with a round display. Existing round smartwatches are popular because they look more like a traditional analog watch than smartwatches with a square display, and so it’s not a surprise to see Samsung giving the whole round smartwatch thing a shot now. The bad news for you Android fans out there is that the device will run Tizen, not Google’s Android Wear software.
