At the Galaxy Note 5 launch event in July, Samsung teased the Gear S2 smartwatch, and the device was eventually unveiled by the company on the last day of August. As it turned out, Samsung introduced not just one, but as many as three different versions of the device, namely, the Gear S2, Gear S2 Classic and Gear S2 3G. At least two of these devices now seem to be heading to India, if reports in the country’s media are to be believed. Sections of the tech media in India are reporting that Samsung is prepping to launch two of the new Gear S2 smartwatches in the country at some stage during next month to coincide with the onset of the festival season. While the Gear S2 and the Gear S2 Classic are the two that are said to have gotten the nod for the India launch, there’s no word on the 3G version of the device, and it isn’t entirely clear at this point in time whether Samsung will bring it to the country at some stage or not.
Sections of the tech media in India had speculated over whether Samsung will launch its smartwatches in the country at an event it had scheduled for yesterday, but that turned out to be a false alarm, as the company only launched the Galaxy Z3 smartphone, which is the second Tizen-based smartphone the company has launched in the country in recent times. Tizen of course, is a Linux kernel-based open source operating system that powers most of Samsung’s smartwatches, including the Gear S2 range. As for the Gear S2 devices, the watches are the first ones from Samsung to come with circular displays, necessitating a complete design change of all apps meant for the Gear smartwatches to suit the display on Samsung’s new offering. Earlier in the week, Samsung actually highlighted eight companies including Nike, Volkswagen, Twitter and Yelp among others for creating apps specifically meant for the circular watch-faces on the company’s latest offerings.
Coming to the tech specs of the devices, all the variants of the Gear S2 come with circular 1.2-inch Super AMOLED displays. The devices are powered by an Exynos SoC with a 1 GHz dual-core processor, and come with 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of internal storage. All Gear S2 variants come with rotating bezels and two dedicated navigation buttons each, along with an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a PPG (heart rate monitor), an ambient light sensor and a barometer. The devices run on Tizen OS as mentioned already, and come with IP68 Certification, which renders them water and dust resistant.