All eyes (including ours) have been on Apple’s upcoming September 10^th release announcements. But yesterday, Samsung debuted their newest offerings, including a smart watch that has a lot of people excited. Last month, we reviewed some of the more popular smart watches on the market, and at that time, we only just heard that Samsung had filed for a trademark for Galaxy Gear. But the watch is here, and it looks pretty amazing.

Smart watches have labored under the impression that they’re a needless accessory: it’s hard to imagine what we’d want on our wrist that isn’t better done with the phone in our pockets. The niche they seem to fill is as a kind of notification device: if you’re inundated by emails or text messages or phone calls or push notifications, your watch will let you know about it first before you feel the need to dig into your pocket and pull out your phone.

It’s understandable if this doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to everyone. But maybe combine that feature with easy updates to the weather or stock tickers and maybe a couple of other apps, and the proposition becomes a little more appealing. Recognizing the limited scope of current smart watches, the Galaxy Gear packs in a few additional toys: there’s a 1.9-megapixel camera, a microphone, two speakers, and a gyroscope and an accelerometer to keep track of your workouts. Read More →