Considering Samsung’s recent show of interest in having everything, right from your kitchen to your bathroom, connected to the internet, it is evident that not only phones and other ‘orthodox’ tech, but also new-found gadgetry such as wearables will be the center of focus for the coming few years. As it stands, we’ve hardly seen much of an advance on the smartphone scene in the past year or so. Why, you wonder? Compare the advancements you’ve noticed in the past one year to how smartphones changed from 2012 to 2013 and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Everything’s been incremental, nothing truly groundbreaking. So, new and rather unexplored areas in technology remain to be terrains yet to be inhabited.
And who better than Samsung to do the honors. What’s great about Samsung is that the company is never shy of an experiment; whether or not these pay off is a completely different story, but the ones that do, turn into something truly special. Take, for example, the Galaxy Note series. No one was really making phones as big as the first gen Galaxy Note back in the day, and the Galaxy Note itself was pretty much rubbished by the critics. Turns out though, they couldn’t be more wrong; the numbers are out for everyone to see. Even a company as ‘conservative’ as HTC has a large screen phone out, and it's far from doing badly on the market.
Coming back to Samsung, another place where it didn’t do too badly was with its Galaxy Gear smartwatch. It was among the first smartwatches to be available in the market, and like many other Samsung products, it did pretty well. However, a certain Motorola soon changed how everyone looked at smartwatches with the launch of its round-dial Motorola Moto 360. In fact, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that it changed the smartwatch market forever. After its launch, people hardly cared about smartwatches that didn’t have round dials, and every other manufacturer had to play catch up.
Funnily enough, despite being the ‘try it all till it works’ sort of manufacturer, Samsung is yet to have a smartwatch in the market with a round dial. It's only about time. General consensus is out in the open, and there’s probably no other firm better than Samsung to realize that it does take a smartwatch with a round dial and great build quality to succeed in the market… at least for the time being. LG’s done it. Alcatel’s done it. Heck, even a company as new as GEAK has done it. So why not Samsung?
While I can’t really give the answer to that, I can tell that it's coming. Of course, nothing’s official as yet, but that’s me speaking from experience. Knowing Samsung, I wouldn’t be surprised if they launch it in metal and a cheaper, plastic option!
People have spent lavishly on the timepiece since the time it came into existence, but fact is that tech companies of today aren’t really able to churn out ones that compare to their non-smart cousins, at least as far as the style quotient is concerned. The ones that have tried to do so (read: Motorola) have embraced great success in no time, which makes you wonder all the more about why Samsung doesn’t have one out already. After all, like I’ve said a million times before, the company isn’t one to shy away from experimenting.
A phone is something that you can keep inside your pocket, but people generally associate with their watches — regardless of them being smart or dumb — in a very different manner. This is perhaps why we’re noticing a massive skew towards those with designs that truly stand out. Samsung hasn’t done too bad with the pricing for its devices, but from what one sees with the Galaxy A series for example, it's that the company is charging a premium for good design (at least as per the company) and a proper metal build. This makes you wonder if Samsung’s metal clad, round-dial smartwatch, whenever it does come, will burn a hole in your pocket. As it stands, the Moto 360 too isn’t the most affordable smartwatch on the market right now; it might well turn out that Samsung’s take on that isn’t the cheapest, too.
Here’s to hoping that Samsung does listen to its users (and well wishers), and makes a smartwatch that isn’t heavy on the pocket, and has a truly remarkable design. We consumers can be a demanding lot, but that’s what Samsung — or any other tech company that dreams of making it big — signed up for, anyway. As for me, I think companies should stick to churning out remarkable designs for the moment — the tech will follow suit.
