We received confirmation in May that Samsung is, as rumors speculated, working on a smartwatch, in fact having been doing so for quite a while as a long-term project. The word came from Samsung’s Executive Vice President Lee Young Hee, and though we haven’t seen any images of the device aside from artists renderings, we may now know the smartwatch’s name: Samsung GEAR.
The information comes from a couple of trademark filings discovered by the folks at Phandroid, and after looking through the documents, there’s no doubt they refer to a smartwatch. One of the documents details a fairly lengthy description of an electronic device and its various software aspects, with the terminology being vague enough to apply to a range of items.
The other filing, however, is full of keywords related to smartwatches, such as “bracelet,” “wrist watch,” “clocks,” and “watchbands.” Beyond that, under a section termed Identification, there’s a description about GEAR that defines it as a watch that can “communicate data to personal digital assistants, smart phones, table PCs, PDA, and personal computers through internet websites and other computer and electronic communications networks; watchbands that communicate data to [the same aforementioned devices].”
Unfortunately, the documents don’t provide enough information to ascertain whether Samsung’s upcoming smartwatch will function similar the Pebble, which is a type of secondary wearable device that makes it more convenient to interact with a smartphone sans having to pull it out of a pocket. Some speculate that a more robust offering will be developed that extends beyond these types of features.
We do know what Mr. Lee said about the smartwatch in May, however, when he explained that Samsung is “working very hard to get ready for it. We are preparing products for the future, and the watch is definitely one of them.” This follows closely after a patent was discovered for a Qualcomm smartwatch in the making called TOQ.
SOURCE: SlashGear
