The Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo.
Samsung
If it wasn't clear to first-generation Galaxy Gear owners that they were beta testing a new product category for Samsung, it should be obvious now: the company has just announced not one but two follow-ups to its original smartwatch, the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo. Both watches drop the Galaxy branding and follow the original Gear by a bare five months.
Neither watch's key specs differ all that much from the first Gear. Both of them have 1.63-inch 320×320 AMOLED displays, 4GB of internal storage, 512MB of RAM, Bluetooth 4.0, and an IR blaster, all identical to the first-generation watch. The biggest internal difference is probably a 1.0GHz dual-core SoC of unspecified make (one of Samsung's own Exynos chips seems like a good bet), an upgrade from the 800MHz single-core chip from the first Gear. The extra performance should help to smooth out some of the performance jitters we noticed in the first Gear. Despite the extra CPU core and a somewhat smaller 300mAh battery, Samsung claims that both Gear 2 watches will last two or three days between charges, roughly doubling the runtime of the original Gear.
Samsung has made even larger changes to the software, jettisoning the original Gear's customized Android 4.2.2 in favor of its own home-grown Tizen operating system. Tizen is a Linux-based mobile OS that rose from the ashes of the MeeGo project back in 2011, and counts Samsung and Intel among its major backers. Engadget notes that the Gear watches are two of the very first commercial products to run Tizen, after Samsung's NX300M camera.
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Samsung replaces Galaxy Gear with a pair of Tizen-powered smartwatches
Andrew Cunningham
Sun, 23 Feb 2014 04:30:40 GMT
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