Samsung’s Galaxy Gear, the company’s first attempt at a smart watch, wasn’t exactly well received by the market. It shipped with hilariously premature software that crippled the battery life and made notifications useless. (kumorisushi.com) It also shipped with support for only smartphone, the Galaxy Note 3. It doesn’t matter that the software got better and compatibility increased a month or two after the product started shipping, because people read the initial Gear reviews, got a bad taste in their mouths, and decided to skip the watch.
Fortunately, having a product fail is nothing new for Samsung, and the company has a way of cranking out new iterations of devices that makes the competition want to hide in a closet and start crying. According to ZD|Net Korea, Samsung will unveil the successor to the Gear in either March or April at an event in London. Said watch will have a flexible OLED screen, and it will look “totally different” compared to the first Gear.
In my review of the Gear, I said I wanted to see three things fixed in the Gear 2. One, the price. I’m sorry, but $300 is too much. If you can’t hit $200, you’re going to scare a lot of people away. Two, compatibility. Learn from Pebble. Learn from the Apple iPod. Make the Gear work with any Android device, and not just a select few devices that have the prefix Galaxy. And three, make it easier to charge, either by including wireless charging, or put the microUSB port on the watch itself.
Even if the Gear 2 tackles one of those problems, it’ll be a far better product.
