Samsung's New Line of Wearables (MWC 2014)

Samsung has announced quite a few new wearables at MWC in Barcelona. They include two new smartwatches and one new fitness band / smartwatch hybrid...

They all run on Samsung’s own Tizen operating system. It is currently used in some of their smart cameras. Even though Android is better known, Tizen is a welcome change as it should run smoother and faster on less powerful hardware. The battery life should be also improved from one day to two to three days. Another additions are IP67 certification (dust and water proof design), thinner and lighter construction, inclusion of heart rate sensor and an IR blaster for controlling TVs. All of these components have been moved into the device itself, so you can finally change watch bands. 

The Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo are nearly identical. The only difference is that Gear 2 Neo will not include a camera. We do not know the exact release date and prices yet, but they should range from 200 to 300 dollars.

The really new product from Samsung is the Gear Fit. It looks similar to Fitbit or Nike+ FuelBand, but it has a curved full color AMOLED screen. Curved display on a wearable product makes definitely more sense as it should be more comfortable to wear. The Fit shares majority of its internals with the Gear 2 Neo, but it does not include an IR blaster, speaker and microphone, so you won’t be able to use the Fit to make phone calls… 

The new line-up seems quite promising and Samsung tried to fix some of the problems users had with the original Galaxy Gear. Only time will tell whether they succeeded…