Samsung officially announces Gear S standalone smart watch, as well as Gear Circle earbuds

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Samsung officially announces Gear S standalone smart watch, as well as Gear Circle earbuds

Hold onto your hats folks — looks like LG prompted Samsung to issue their smart watch announcement a bit early. The company today confirmed the existence of a new smart watch that might hold a tremendous amount of value for those who don’t fancy tethering to a smartphone for their smart watch needs.

What you see above is what we’ve been calling the “Gear Solo,” and comes with its own embedded 3G radios so you can make calls and use data without having to tether it to a smartphone. Beyond that, it actually sounds like a pretty powerful smart watch under the hood. Here are the specs you can look forward to:

• 2-inch Super AMOLED display at 480 x 360


• dual-core 1GHz processor


• 512MB of RAM


• 4GB of storage


• WiFi N, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS w/GLONASS


• 300mAh battery

Samsung says you can get up to 2 days of “typical” usage out of this thing, though we’re sure that will eventually vary from person to person. As for software you can expect Tizen to be running on this bad boy (which we know isn’t the most popular thing Samsung could have used).

The design looks pretty sleek, but you’re out of luck if you want to customize the wrist band.

Following that announcement is the Gear Circle, an accessory that’ll let you listen to tunes, make phone calls and issue voice commands on either your phone or smart watch. We thought the Gear Circle would turn out to be a smart watch with a circular display, but it looks like Samsung had something totally different in mind. Where does it get its name? The fact that it can wrap around your neck and clasp into a magnetic mechanism, effectively making a “circle.” You can also call it the geekiest necklace you’ll ever wear.

Samsung expects their latest products to be available this October, and we imagine they’ll push them quite heavily alongside the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 expected to be unveiled in one short week. No pricing details have been mentioned at this point, though we’re sure Samsung will be throwing us the details once they are finalized.

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