Never let it be said that Samsung doesn’t know how to react to product launches, or announcements from their competitors. After all, this is the company that will do whatever it takes to be number one, and with this latest piece of news, it seems Samsung needs yet another crack at the smartwatch. As if Samsung hadn’t released enough smartwatches in the past 12 months, with the arrival of the Galaxy Gear, Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and now the Gear S, they’re apparently working on something even better. And yes, this is to take on the the iWatch, sorry, Apple Watch.
According to Business Week Korea, which is citing a “high-ranking officer at Samsung Electronics”, the Korean giant is working on a new smartwatch that features a fingerprint sensor on the watch itself as well as a payment solution. The fingerprint sensor will presumably be for security purposes, but outside of that payment solution that’s rumored to go with it, it seems fairly redundant on a smartwatch. It’s rumored that Samsung and PayPal will be working closely together, which makes sense when you think that Apple has blocked the NFC chip in the iPhone 6 off from anyone other than themselves. Besides, PayPal is pretty desperate get a foothold in the mobile payments space and what better way to do that than work with a mobile giant like Samsung? This payments solution is said to expand to as much as 50 nations worldwide.
According to the source, Samsung will be preparing to launch this new smartwatch during Mobile World Congress next year, the same place we saw Samsung launch the Gear 2 lineup earlier this year in February. Right now though, this is just a rumor, so there’s no telling what will come of these devices when or if they launch next spring. After all, that’s a long way off, but with Apple making such bold claims with Apple Pay and the Apple Watch, we wouldn’t be surprised if the next Samsung smartwatch was more than a little different from this year’s efforts.