Most of Samsung’s smartwatches are designed to be used with a smartphone. The Samsung Gear S is a watch you can use with… or in stead of a phone.
It has a 2 inch screen, a Tizen-based operating system and the ability to pair with a phone or tablet to display notifications on your wrist. But it also featured support for 2G and 3G networks, allowing you to access the internet even when the Gear S isn’t tethered to a smartphone. You can even use it to make or receive phone calls.
Samsung unveiled the Gear S in August, and now the company has announced that it’ll be available in the US this fall.
Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint will all offer the Gear S, although there’s no word on how much it’ll cost yet.
The watch has a 360 x 480 pixel curved Super AMOLED display, a 1 GHz dual-core processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage. It’s dust and water resistant, features 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.1, and a 300mAh battery for up to 2 days of run time.
There’s also a microphone that you can use for voice commands or making phone calls. You could also pair a Bluetooth headset with the device if you don’t want to do the Dick Tracy thing and hold the watch up to your mouth to talk.
In some ways, the Gear S is one of Samsung’s first Tizen smartphones. The company’s been developing phones that run on the Linux-based operating system for a few years, but the launch dates for those phones keep getting pushed back. Meanwhile there are already watches, cameras, and other devices that use a simpler version of Tizen.
Now one of those watches can also be used as a phone. Samsung hopes to launch the first Tizen phone with a more traditional smartphone design in India this fall.
via Android Central
Watch as a phone replacement seems like the cooler application.
Two inches is kind of big for a watch face. The face in the picture looks nice. I like that it’s is curved. I’m not sure about the battery indicator, but I suppose there will be an after market for alternate faces.