Lockdown may have stopped much of daily life, but it looks like it’s almost business as usual in Samsung’s smartwatch department.
The company has just received certification from Chinese regulators regarding a pair of new smartwatches, reports SamMobile. This is usually one of the final steps for a new product to go through before it is announced and goes on sale, so it looks like new Samsung smartwatches are imminent.
And yet, despite rumours of the wearables circulating for a few months now, we still know very little about them. With all the usual technology tipsters seemingly on furlough, we haven’t even got any leaked images to go on.
We heard in January how Samsung is referring to the new watch using the internal codename Noblesse, which - as we're sure you all know - is a 13th-century word used to describe French nobility, so this could be a rather classy smartwatch.
We also know the model references are SM-R840 and SM-R850, which likely means we’re looking at a new smartwatch available in two sizes. These options will probably be 40mm and 44mm, like the current Samsung Galaxy Watch Active2.
Another pair of model numbers, R845 and R855, have also been seen recently, and these likely refer to LTE versions of the same watch.
We also previously heard that the watch will have 8GB of storage capacity (mostly for playing music offline), and a large 330 mAh battery. It is likely that the new watch will be called either the Galaxy Watch 2, or the Galaxy Watch Active 3, but with no marketing material leaking yet, it’s impossible to say for sure which way Samsung will go on that one.
Since no new smartwatch arrived alongside the Galaxy S20 smartphone earlier this year, we would normally expect to see the wearables land with a new Galaxy Note phone in the second half of the year. But given the widespread disruption caused by the global lockdown, all bets are off for 2020. Perhaps the watch will arrive with the new Note in the summer, or maybe Samsung will announce it via a surprise press release in the coming weeks.
What we can say with near-certainty is that the new watch will feature more health and fitness-based tech than ever, and with a focus on wellbeing too and sleep tracking, too.
Liked this?
