Samsung Galaxy Gear: The Smartwatch Paving the Way for a Wearable Future?
On Wednesday in Berlin, Samsung will seek to kickstart a whole new category of electronics. After the smartphone and the tablet, both pioneered by Apple, the South Korean electronics giant will unveil its smart watch.
Dubbed the Galaxy Gear, Samsung is likely to pitch its design as the perfect companion to a new mobile phone-cum-tablet, the Galaxy Note 3. And the overarching idea is not just to present Samsung as the brand that geeks should buy into - it is to encourage what Samsung calls “a smarter life”, where consumers of all demographics enter a brave new world in which technology is not just something we all increasingly use, but also something we wear.
We have, of course, all been here before. The Casio calculator watch swept the classrooms of the world in the Eighties; in between Sony has launched a host of smart watches to almost total consumer indifference, and even its latest models, critically acclaimed, are limited in their ambitions and sold primarily as a companion device to their own mobile phones. When it comes to other kinds of wearable technologies, such as the Bluetooth headset and the wristband-based Fitbit and Fitbug, their appeal too is largely limited to early adopters.
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