Samsung may be selling millions of Android smartphones for the last couple of years, but smart phones is not the only thing that is a focus at the Korean company’s R&D labs – Samsung Mobile VP Lee Young Hee has confirmed to Bloomberg that Samsung is working on a smart watch for quite some time and wants to bring it to market in the near future.
“We’ve been preparing the watch product for so long,” said Lee Young Hee, also adding “We are working very hard to get ready for it. We are preparing products for the future, and the watch is definitely one of them.” Android wasn’t mentioned anywhere, but considering Samsung uses Google’s OS in most of their mobile devices and also taking into account Android’s open source nature, it doesn’t take a genius to figure that the watch will run on Android as well.
This isn’t Samsung’s first attempt at a smart wristwatch – the S9110 (pictured at the top) was a smart watch Samsung launched way back in 2009 before pulling it from the market due to low consumer interest. However, with Apple also said to be working on a smart watch, we can see the inspiration Samsung had for having another go at it. Sony already has a SmartWatch in the market that hasn’t been able to make an impact, but Samsung’s (and Apple’s) powerful stature in today’s technology world may just be what these smart watches need to become popular.
There’s no telling what we might (or might not) be able to do on these smart watches, but as Lee points out, it has to be something that consumers find “meaningful,” and being able to synchronize – or even control – mobile devices would no doubt be one of the most important features.
For now, we’ll just have to wait and see what the future holds for our wrists.
Discussion