Samsung comes ‘full circle’ with new Gear 2 smartwatch

The watch comes with a new circular design with custom UX and advanced features.

“The Gear S2’s unique rotating bezel, along with the Home and Back buttons, ensures users will have a quicker, more precise method to comfortably access notifications and applications”. While under the hood, the Gear S2 will ship with 4GB of internal storage, topped off with 512MB of RAM. Samsung is also promising an impressive two to three days of battery life.

The Samsung Gear S2 and Gear S2 classic will be showcased at the annual IFA trade show in Berlin on 3 September. Like the previous Gear S, there’s an option to buy the Gear S2 with a built-in 3G radio so that you can use it completely independently of your phone. The Gear S2 3G comes with the SM-R730 model number and is equipped with a 1.2-inch Circular Super AMOLED display with a 360 x 360 resolution (302 ppi).

“The Gear S2 demonstrates Samsung’s commitment to being a pioneer in wearable device innovation and advancing our smartwatch category, ” a spokersperson said. Samsung finally released a passel of product details, including the surprise that there will actually be two flavors of the device: the Gear S2 and the Gear S2 Classic.

Like the Apple Watch, the Gear S2 will also support mobile payments via near-field communication (NFC), so you’ll be able to put your watch up to a NFC reader at a participating retailer’s register, and quickly pay for your items.

Today, Samsung announced a pair of Galaxy Gear wearables for its platform-the Gear S2 and the Gear S2 Classic. Under the hood, the watch has an optimized 1-GHz dual core processor and runs Tizen OS – which up until recently was exclusively used for Samsung’s smartwatch and TV offerings. The regular model will be available in a dark gray case with gray band or in silver with a white band. In other words.as fun as Apple Watch and Android Wear can be, they are very much version 1.0 of smartwatches. A 3G model of the watch will allow users to make calls. Based on what we know of it so far, though, the Gear S2 is an nicely-designed smartwatch, and I’m really interesting in seeing how the rotating bezel feels and if it makes navigating through the UI better than simply touching and flicking. The company will also offer a version of the standard Gear S2 with a 3G radio and a slightly beefier 300-mAh battery. On the other hand, they’re limited in terms of third party support from app developers.