Samsung announced the Gear S smartphone in August this year featuring a 2-inch curved Super AMOLED touchscreen, full 2G/3G connectivity, and a bunch of sensors in a device which is very small when compared to a usual smartphone. Today, Samsung has published a blogpost explaining how hard it was for their designers and engineers to conceptualise, design, and develop the Gear S. It is the first smartwatch from Samsung which features cellular connectivity, which makes it really easy for the users to handle calls, receive notifications from their accompanying smartphone or tablet, or to use the navigation while driving. Samsung designed something called a Relay Server to implement the notifications forwarding system. Even though the Gear S isn't the first wearable device from Samsung to feature a curved display, it wouldn't have been easy to choose the right screen size, maintaining a balance between the screen real estate, wearability, and designing an apt user interface for the screen size.
Senior Designer Dohyoung Kim, UX Design Group at Samsung Electronics, states that if the Gear S didn't have a 2-inch screen, it would not have been possible to provide a full onscreen QWERTY keyboard, which would've made it really hard for the users to input long sentences. Also, due to the curved display, Samsung had to use other components such as the battery and the antenna in curved form factors. Samsung successfully created the industry's first smartwatch with a standalone smart wearable device with full featured connectivity suite and a feature-rich experience. Do you think that smartwatches can replace smartphones in the future?
