Samsung Galaxy Gear

Available now
5th September 2013

Smart watches are suddenly becoming a hot development point with devices such as Sony's Smartwatch 2 already on the market and a rumoured upcoming device from Apple also on the horizon. Samsung's entry into the smart watch arena is the Samsung Galaxy Gear, but unlike the Sony offering the Gear appears to work with recent Samsung Galaxy smartphones only.

The Samsung Galaxy Gear can inform the wearer of incoming messages and alerts, make hands-free calls, control watch functions through voice activation and take photos and video clips from the built-in camera. There's also a voice memo function and a useful "Find My Device" feature to help locate just wherever it is your paired smartphone has vanished to.

There are applications designed especially for the Galaxy Gear, including an eBay app, a version of Evernote and some personal fitness applications as well. Also, there's an emergency alert procedure that can notify contacts of an urgent problem by pressing the power button three times.

The display is a 1.6" 320 x 320 pixel panel and there is a 1.9 megapixel camera tucked into the wrist band itself. Inside is a small 315mAh battery, 4GB of internal storage, and 800 MHz processor and 512MB of RAM. There's a lot more technology squeezed into the Samsung Galaxy Gear than the Sony Smartwatch 2, but the downsize of this is that the Samsung weighs 74 grams which is lot heavier than a normal watch.

Hopefully the battery will be enough to get it through the day.. nobody will want to take their watch off to charge it at lunchtime. And it is still to be seen if there's actually a market for smart watches at all, but it is good to see Samsung trying it out to gauge consumer responses. Samsung say that the Galaxy Gear should be available from September onwards but did not give any guidance on pricing.