Samsung has finally unveiled its third smartwatch, the Gear S3, ending months of speculations and rumors about what the company was planning to do. This smartwatch was unveiled yesterday at an event the company had before IFA 2016 officially starts.
We were expecting three variants of the Gear S3 but it looks like Samsung has decided to stick to only two at the moment. These two variants are the Gear S3 Classic and the Gear S3 Frontier. The Gear S3 classic is made for normal users while the Gear S3 frontier is made for those who live an active lifestyle.
Both variants have 1.3 inch Super AMOLED displays with 360 x 360-pixel resolution. Samsung says that it has improved the sensitivity of the Gear S3 and that users can use it even when wearing gloves. This display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass SR+, this is the first smartwatch to spot this kind of protection.
The Samsung Gear S3 has a built in microphone and speaker for voice calls. It also comes with a GPS, an altimeter/barometer, quite a welcomed addition to the Samsung’s smartwatch family. In addition to this, the Gear S3 is IP68 water and dust resistant and this means that you can submerge it under water for up to 10 meters for 30 minutes.
Powering the Samsung Gear S3 is the 1GHz Exynos processor paired with 768MB of RAM and 4GB of RAM. As expected, it comes with is powered by Tizen (version 2.3.2).
As for the battery, the Gear S3 comes with a 380mAh unit which is a bit larger than the 300mAh unit offered by the Gear S2. This addition is definitely a good thing and we will have to wait a see if this translates to more battery life in real world usage.
For connectivity, the Gear S3 classic supports 3G and LTE while the frontier supports Wi-Fi/Bluetooth. This is one of the main differences between the two variants, the other one is that the classic is available in rubber bands and in black only while the frontier is available in silver and has leather bands.
Both watches can be paired with any device running Android KitKat and above with at least 1.5GB of RAM. Pricing and availability will be revealed at a later date.
Also Read: The Samsung Gear S2 and Gear Fit 2 Will Soon Be Able to Support iOS devices