Samsung just revealed the Galaxy Gear successors, the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo.
The Korean electronics giant Samsung has just unveiled the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo a day before the Mobile World Congress 2014 kicks off, this time these smartwatches do not sport Android OS like what the company did with the Galaxy Gear which was launched last year, instead Samsung introduced their very own mobile OS on these new Gears, Tizen. Now since there's no more Android in these new Gear smartwatches, my question is will these still work with the current Galaxy smartphones we have? Let's find out.
Of course they do! In fact these Gears support "more than dozens" of Galaxy smartphones and that's according to the Samsung press release, thank goodness. Anyway it will be less appealing if these new smartwatches won't be compatible with Galaxy devices which is also one of the main purposes of a wrist-worn device. However, there is still no word yet if these Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo will also support non-Samsung smartphones. I guess we'll know more about the devices at the MWC which will be kicking off starting tomorrow in Barcelona.
Samsung previously unveiled that they were doing some rework on the design of the watches, yes they did as what the official photos of the Gears here show, the physical design is much slimmer and sleeker than the Galaxy Gear. Speaking of the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo's sizes, they are almost exactly the same dimensions as the first Gear only about a millimeter thinner. These Gears are less bulkier than the Galaxy Gear because Samsung managed to put the 2MP camera in the watch itself than on its strap plus the battery is a bit smaller than the original which only has 300mAh compared to 315mAh of the previous Gear. However, this smaller battery size does not mean less power. One of the downs on the Galaxy Gear is that the Android OS somehow consumes more battery than expected that's why many users have to charge the device almost everyday, on these Tizen-powered Gears, Samsung says that their operating system consumes less power making the devices to last up to 3 days of typical usage while up to 6 days of low usage, let us also thank to its low-powered Bluetooth 4.0 feature.
The display remains the same on these new gadgets at 1.63-inch Super AMOLED display with 320x320 resolution. Processors are more powerful this time as Samsung puts 1GHz dual-core chip in, that's an upgrade from 800MHz single-core processor in the Galaxy Gear. The RAM remains the same at 512MB and the internal storage at 4GB. Plus the Gears will be available in Charcoal Black, Mocha Brown and Wild Orange. Samsung says the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo will be available starting April but pricing for the two are not revealed yet. I assume that the Gear 2 Neo will be more affordable than the Gear 2 since it does not have camera built-in which is the only difference between the two. We will hear more about the device, including first impressions of the bloggers about the Gears at the MWC event in Spain.
