Smartwatches, and wearables in general, are becoming an integral part of today’s tech. We’ve seen a lot of wearables launched in 2014 and some of them became extremely popular, especially smartwatches. Analysts say that 2015 will be even bigger as far as wearables are concerned, so I guess we’ll be seeing a ton of them launched this year as well. Anyhow, Samsung has launched a bunch of smartwatches thus far, but still doesn’t have a round one in its lineup. That will change according to recent reports which have been saying that the company is getting ready to launch their very own circular smartwatch offering in order to compete with the Moto 360 and the LG G Watch R.
According to reports, Samsung has been developing the round smartwatch since August last year, a bunch of patents showed up and the whole project is allegedly codenamed “Orbis”. SamMobile is back with a bunch of new info on this smartwatch, he claims that their sources are trustworthy, but cannot guarantee for the information, Samsung can always change things up before the release, says SamMobile. That being said, let’s see what’s what.
It was reported earlier that this smartwatch will feature a rotary bezel ring on top of the watch, but the functions of this ring weren’t disclosed at the time. Well, this new information reveals part of its function. It looks like you’ll be able to swipe down from the top in order to access the drop-down menu, where you’ll find the usual notification shade things like brightness control, bluetooth, battery, do not disturb mode, etc. The opposite action, swiping from the bottom up, will get you to the recent apps menu, very similar to the one on the Gear S it seems. If you slowly rotate the ring to the right, it will show you one app at a time, if you rotate it faster, it will show you three apps at the same time. The “crown” power button will close this menu.
This is not all, not by a long shot. If you rotate the ring to the right on the home screen, you’ll get to see the widgets that are currently in use, and if you rotate it in the other direction after you reach a certain widget by doing that action, you’ll get to see the content of that particular widget. If you rotate the ring to the left, you’ll see your notifications and will be able to browse them.
Let’s move on to the phone call part, if someone is calling you, you can rotate the ring to the right in order to reject the phone call, and if you move it to the left it will reject the call and send the caller a preset message. If you’d like to end a call via the watch, you can simply press the crown and that’s it.
Music player is the next piece of information that SamMobile share. While listening to music, you can rotate the ring to the left in order to move back a track, or to the right to skip the current track. If you swipe from the bottom up, you’ll see a list of your current tracks, playlists, albums and artists, you can cycle through those by rotating the ring in either direction.
This ring will have tons of functions it seems, you’ll be able to dismiss or snooze the ongoing alarm, rotate through different clocks, use Find my Device function and cycle through current weather, hourly forecast and weekly forecast. This is just a glimpse at some of the functions this smartwatch will offer, I’m sure it sounds complicated, but once you get used to it… who knows. Anyhow, this smartwatch is expected to launch at MWC in Barcelona which will take place in March. Let us know what you think of all this and stay tuned, I’m sure more info will follow soon.