Samsung, Apple to fight for your wrist with ‘smart-watches’
Samsung executive says smart-watch project has been in development for a while.
In technology news, we’ve learnt that there are very few actual coincidences. So, excuse us if we can see a direct link between recent stories about Apple seriously working on a smart watch and yesterday’s reveal by a Samsung executive that the South Korean company was also developing a smart-watch. While speaking to Bloomberg, Executive Vice-President of Mobile Business for Samsung, Lee Young Hee said that Samsung had been working on a smart-watch for a while.
Just last month, we reported that Apple was taking the smart watch concept seriously enough to assign a 100 member team to work on it. Patents filed by Apple show that the watch could have a battery that’s powered by movement and solar energy, it could feature a slap bracelet-like mechanism to wrap around the user’s wrist and also feature a display that changed its surface area according to the size of the user’s wrist.
Samsung hasn’t revealed any details about its watch but this won’t be the first attempt by the Korean company in making a watch that does more than just tell you the time. The Verge points out that in 1999, Samsung released the SPH-WP10 a wristwatch that also had a built in mobile phone. Ten years later, in 2009, Samsung launched the S9110, a watch with a touchscreen display that was also able to sync Outlook mails and play music and came with Bluetooth 2.1 support along with voice recognition. However, since then, this is the first that we’ve heard from Samsung regarding a smart-watch.
Apple, on the other hand, has seen some (maybe inadvertent) success because, thanks to accessories, the new iPod Nano has seen somewhat widespread use as a watch.
Why Smart-Watches & Why Now?
The Bloomberg story points out that wearable computing devices may just be the next big thing in personal technology especially considering the fact that the mobile phone segment is supposed to hit its saturation soon with annual growth falling to 9.7% in 2017 from 27% in 2013. The global watch market, on the other hand is worth $60 billion and although that number may be a lot less than what the mobile segment segment is worth, it’s not exactly a segment to laugh off.
With Google also showing interest in wearable computing with its Glass project, and devices like the Pebble smart-watch gaining popularity, it seems likely that it won’t be only Apple and Samsung throwing their development behind smart devices that you can wear.