Roger Fingas
Images leaked on Monday showed Samsung's upcoming Gear Fit 2, a device that may provide tougher competition in fitness wearables for companies like Apple and Fitbit.
The new device includes a wider display than the original Fit, according to photos discovered by SamMobile. This should allow it to show much more information onscreen, in a style akin to full-scale smartwatches like the Apple Watch, or some higher-end fitness trackers.
Two of the photos in fact show a map view tracing a run, which could indicate the Fit 2 will have built-in GPS, or at least be able to tap into a smartphone's GPS to similar effect. Only expensive top-end fitness trackers tend to come with built-in GPS, as a rule.
Earlier rumors have suggested the Fit 2 will have a 1.84-inch AMOLED display, 4 gigabytes of storage, a heartrate monitor, and a graphics processor embedded into its CPU. The device may also sport Samsung's "Bio-Processor," intended to improve the general accuracy of fitness tracking.
The gapless construction of the Fit 2 could hint that it will be waterproof. While many wearables are water-resistant, like the Watch and the earlier Fit, relatively few are actually waterproof and hence safe to take swimming or in the shower.
The new device is expected to launch in June. Although Apple is hosting its Worldwide Developers Conference that month, there's no indication — yet — that the company will have any sort of "reply" to Samsung, whether in terms of new Watch hardware or a watchOS update.
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13 Comments
And people say Watch is fugly...
"Two of the photos in fact show a map view tracing a run, which could indicate the Fit 2 will have built-in GPS, or at least be able to tap into a smartphone's GPS to similar effect. Only expensive top-end fitness trackers tend to come with built-in GPS, as a rule." First, the Gear Fit is a smart watch, just a cheaper one with a smaller screen and less features the Galaxy Gear, and hence is not merely an activity tracker with a bigger display akin to devices like the Fitbit Charge and the Garmin VivoFit. The OS on the Gear Fit is the same as on the Galaxy Gear S2: Tizen. Both the original Galaxy Gear and Gear Fit ran (pre-Android Wear) Android and were updated to Tizen when Samsung decided to go their own way on wearables and IoT. With that in mind, the Galaxy Gear and several - but not all - Android Wear devices have GPS built in. Whether Apple should follow suit depends on whether Apple sees the Apple Watch as a fitness device or a fashion device. If it is the latter, they should worry about the device's size, shape, band, battery life and aesthetics and forget about the power-draining GPS. If it is the former, then yes GPS is the direction that they should go. Or ... if they absolutely must include a power-draining feature, do some innovating and make it 3G with SIM-card emulation software that a carrier could use to give it the same phone number as your iPhone. (That Google, supposedly a software/services leader, hasn't done this yet despite having a 1 year head start is laughable, especially since Google already has apps like Messenger, Hangouts and Voice that could take full advantage.) An alternative: come up with multiple models of Apple Watch like Motorola. The Motorola base model watch does not offer 3G, but the Motorola Sport does. LG has one watch that supports LTE and another that doesn't. So Apple could offer devices with combinations of Wi-Fi, 3G and GPS depending on price point.
This is the most fucking ugly thing I've ever seen.Beyond ugly, it's the next stage of ugliness : a new frontier
.If Apple does a "gps version", it should be a separate one than existing models, one dedicated to sports exclusively, at least for now, since GPS/Cell (the only way to get correct position quick) is massively draining and you don't get through the day with it unless the watch/band is way way bigger than the AW.
Just watch any space-oriented sci-fi show to see what the future looks like. Devices like this fit right in.
Horrible looking...this is what happens when Samsung has to design their own product without the luxury of cloning apples...