The trend of launching a device first in the western nations (or the home country of the brand) and then after a long time making its way to India is something that has been slowly fading away recently, two of Samsung’s most popular accessories from 2015 however; the Gear S2 smartwatch and the Gear VR Virtual Reality headset have been long overdue here in India. But a recent credible report states that these devices will soon be making their way to the Indian market and that too within this month of January.
The Gear VR partnered with Oculus has been lauded as one of the best mobile VR solutions till date and costs just about $99 (Rs. 6,700). The Gear VR will however require one of Samsung’s top of the line flagship devices from 2015, S6, S6 edge, S6 edge plus or the Note 5 to act as the display inside the Headset. Being a Tizen based device, the Gear S2 smartwatch is what we will be focussing more on here.
It isn’t the first time that Samsung had launched a smartwatch in India. The Gear Live (one of the first Android wear smartwatch), Gear 2,Gear 2 Neo and Gear Fit have all made their presence in the Indian market in the past but failed to grab hold of a market share thanks to how niche the smartwatch scene was back then. This time however, with the Gear S2 launched at IFA 2015, Berlin Samsung has taken a different turn but in the right direction. The design aspects of the Gear S2 along with its circular display has been well received by consumers worlwide.The Gear S2 has three variants; Gear S2, Gear S2 classic and the Gear S2 3G and it is unclear as of now on which variants will be announced here (so stay tuned for more updates).
The user experience on the Gear S2 has been constantly evolving with more watchfaces, apps and services making as more developers are getting familiar with its highly potential Tizen based OS. Samsung recently made an announcement at CES 2016, Las Vegas that it will soon be pushing an update that will make the Gear S2 even compatible with iOS devices!
For the tech savvy folks, heres the complete specification of the Gear S2-
- 1.2 inch 360x360p Super AMOLED circular display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection and rotating bezel control
- Qualcomm S4 SOC (2x A7 1GHz CPU and Adreno 305 GPU) on S2 3G and Exynos 3250 (2x A7 1GHz CPU and MALI 400 MP@ GPU)
- 512 MB RAM and 4GB flash storage
- 250 mah battery (S2 and S2 classic) 300 mah (S2 3G) with wireless charging
- IP68 water and dust resistant
- Accelerometer, Gyro, Heart Rate Monitor, Barometer, Ambient light, GPS (3G only) sensors
- Bluetooth 4.1 LE, NFC, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
- Tizen OS
