BARCELONA—Tizen's here. It's on your wrist. Today Samsung announced the second generation of its smartwatch line, the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo - and surprise, unlike the previous Galaxy Gear, they don't run Android.
We'll have to wait until tomorrow to figure out exactly what that means, but at the very least, it's a sign that Samsung considered its previous Android-based platform too heavy, cumbersome, and power-consuming.
The switch doesn't make the watches much smaller: at about 37 by 58 by 10mm, they're just a millimeter slimmer than the previous Galaxy Gear , and have the same sized body. But these Gears get much better battery life, with 2-3 days of typical usage and six days of "low usage," where you needed to charge the original Gear every day. The new watches are compatible with "more than dozens" of Samsung smartphones, according to the official press release.
The two Gears both have 1.63-inch, 320-by-320 Super AMOLED displays and 1GHz dual-core processors. The Gear 2 has a 2-megapixel camera on the body of the watch - not a bulge on the strap anymore - which means you can actually replace the watch band (and there are six colored bands available.) The Neo doesn't have a camera, so it'll probably cost a little less.
The watches have a bunch of features: an IR remote control, pedometer, heart rate sensor, notifications, phone media controllers, calendar, voice control, voice memo and the like, and they can even play video and music on the watches themselves, storing data in their 4GB of internal memory. But what really intrigues me here is the 20 big-name, third-party apps Samsung is advertising. With a completely new SDK, will others join on?
The most interesting surprise here, of course, is Tizen. Tizen is Intel and Samsung's Linux-based operating system that's been percolating for years now, widely assumed to be Samsung's backup plan if this whole Android thing doesn't work out. We're going to hear more about Tizen at a press event on Sunday, but the new Gears are the first actual Tizen handheld devices anyone's announced.
We'll have to find out more when we get our hands on the Gear 2 models on Monday at Mobile World Congress.
UPDATE: Check out our hands on with the new smartwatches, and the Gear Fit, and the video below.