Samsung’s New Smart Watches Have Fitness Features

Samsung’s first Galaxy Gear smartwatch came out last fall amid much fanfare, but it landed with a thud in the market place. Samsung unveiled two new computerized wristwatches on Sunday, this time including health sensors and related fitness features to give people a reason to buy one. Samsung and its smartwatch rivals had failed to persuade many consumers that they need to be able to be constantly check messages from their wrists. Wearable devices that succeeded tended to be fitness product such as the fitbit. The new Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo will have a heart rate sensor, a pedometer and various tools to measures exercise, sleep and strees level. The low-resolution, 2-megapixel camera on the Gear 2 is being moved to the main body; it was on the strap on the original Gear. Its not immediately clear if the Gear 2 Neo has a camera. Its also unclear whether the new watches will continually display the time. In the original Gear, that was shut off to save battery, which lasted just a day.
The new watches promise two or three days under normal use, putting them more in line with what rivals offer. The company decided to make the latest smartwatches a little-known operating system called Tizen OS, instead of the Android system from Google used in the original Gear, as the south Korean electronics company tries to break the dominance google has on mobile devices. The move gives some credence to a fledgling system that Samsung and other backers want to see on all sorts of devices, including televisions, refrigerators and cars. Samsung already has a Tizen camera out, but a Tizen phone has yet to emerge, despite expectations of one last year.
For now, Samsung is putting Tizen on a smartwatch instead. Although Google gives away Android for any manufacturer to use in its gadgets, its loaded with a range of Google services, including stores for apps, music and video. Samsung is trying to promote its own stores as well and ends up confusing users by including two of everything. To prevent Google from having a similar dominance in wearable devices and other gadgets beyond phones tablets, Samsung is pushing Tizen OS as an alternative. The original Gear worked with selected Samsung phones to display email and text alerts. It also had a camera on the strap for low-resolution photos and speakerphone on the watch.