Samsung’s executive vice president of mobile, Lee Young Hee, has confirmed the company is working on its own take on the Smartwatch concept.
During an interview with Bloomberg, the Samsung chief said: ‘We are preparing products for the future, and the watch is definitely one of them.’
‘We’ve been preparing the watch product for so long,’ he added.
Commenting on reports of Apple’s iWatch, Lee implied the deciding factor would be ‘who will first commercialise it so consumers can use it meaningfully.’
Earlier in the month, news emerged that Apple had put its design guru Jony Ive in charge of an iWatch project along with 100 engineers. The product is pegged to arrive before the end of the year.
No other information was revealed about the Samsung watch in the interview with Lee and it’s not clear whether it will use the Galaxy brand, or whether it will run Android.
Tizen, Samsung’s platform developed in co-operation with Intel, is another possibility, or the device could follow Samsung’s new REX brand of phones running Java-based software with the TouchWiz interface.
We think TouchWiz is pretty much a given, but if it’s to compete with Apple’s iWatch this will need to be a premium product, so the REX branding or Java software seem unlikely.
Apple’s iWatch will of course run iOS, so Samsung will want to keep its own experience suitably feature-rich in order to compete.
Wearable smart devices look set to become a growing trend with both of the biggest mobile players working on smartwatches and Android giant Google preparing its Project Glass spectacles.
Hopefully at this rate we’ll have our robot butlers and flying cars before you know it.
by pbriden via Featured Articles
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