For our fellow readers it won’t come as a surprise that Tizen 3.0 is going to be supported on all variants of Gear S3: Classic, Frontier, BT, LTE – but hey, there’s more: Samsung’s current flagship Tizen-based smartwatch will enable users, according to our source, to control their smart devices with a turn of the bezel. What was previously unconceivable for Gear S3 – if not through IFTTT – is about to be deployed on millions of devices.
What?
We previously reported that the firmware currently being tested at Samsung is CQI4. But we got new leaks from our source: Samsung is indeed already internally working on firmware CQJ2. With such firmware, Samsung seems to be much more IoT-oriented than before, empowering users to seamless interact with their Internet-connected devices and appliances at home – a move fully in line with Samsung’s grand plan for the smart home.
What’s more, our expectation is that Samsung Gear S3 will be compatible with Samsung Connect. Just take a look at the image below, from Samsung’s website.
The Samsung Connect app is at the moment only available on some mobile devices, tablets not included. The image says “Samsung Connect lets you control your compatible smart devices and appliances, including lights, door locks, the TV and more with a turn of the bezel”. The app is expected to be supported on Samsung Gear Sport as you can see in the image above and, according to our sources, on Gear S3 as well with the coming firmware update.
Supporting Samsung Connect on Gear Sport as well as Gear 3 makes sense, since they’re both based on the same OS, i.e. Tizen OS. And it could certainly be a major enabling factor for the adoption of Samsung’s smart home solutions, first and foremost due to the immediacy of use. Competitive products such as Apple Watch still need hardware add-ons to become your universal remote control, and when Samsung releases this on the market we are curious to see its impact on smartwatch sales. May be IoT remote control the killer app for smarwatches? We’ll see.
