Galaxy Gear smartwatch to feature 10 hour battery life

Shawn Knight

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galaxy gear smartwatch

More bits of information on Samsung’s upcoming smartwatch have hit the web today including the claim that it will carry a 10 hour battery life. The Galaxy Gear will also ship with 1GB of RAM and your choice of either 6GB or 8GB of onboard storage according to a source at a Samsung warehouse facility as reported by AmongTech.

Other specifications are said to include a 2.5-inch, 320 x 320 non-flexible OLED display that’s bigger than screens offered on competing smartwatches. There’s also a 4-megapixel integrated camera capable of recording video in 720p quality. Earlier reports suggested the watch will be powered by a Samsung Exynos 4212 dual core 1.5GHz with Mali-400 MP4 GPU.

An array of sensors will likely accompany the Galaxy Gear including an accelerometer, Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy and GPS. Speakers are said to be located in the wrist strap and the whole setup will run Android 4.2 Jelly Bean although it’s unknown exactly how the OS will be laid out or how it will interact with your smartphone.

The capacity choices do seem a bit suspect, however, as 4GB and 8GB options make more sense from a practical and pricing standpoint. Also, 10 hours of uptime isn’t exactly enough to make it through a typical day but once again, it’s unclear if the 10-hour rating is total uptime or time spent with the screen on. While it’s nice to have the time displayed at all times like on a traditional watch, it really isn’t necessary either.

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I still have mechanical watch that you can wind up in a few seconds and it'll last for more than a day. I wonder how can the Samsung's contraption compete with the old school outdated spring-and-cog technology in that respect. But of course, telling time would be the last thing this watch will do, just like making calls is the last thing a modern mobile phone does. The main purpose is, of course, to drain your pocket, kill your eyesight and shorten your attention span with streams of needless information in all forms and colours. Apple made a genius move by spreading rumours about making iWatch. Now all their rivals have invested into this stupid idea, and will go bust with it - not enough people will want to wear a several hundred bucks of paperweight on his wrist, and charge it every 10 hours. Really, all this charging, a modern man must have a special cupboard just for all the gadgets he charges - my laptop, my phone, my tablet, my mp3 player, my watch, my glasses, my bluetooth headset, my something I can't remember what it does but it looked cool in the ad, my extra battery for charging on the go, my shaver, my trimmer, my toothbrush, and the same set for my wife and two kids. And a nightmare at night makes you wake up in cold sweat: have I charged everything?! Nobody's charging us, you know.
 
"While it’s nice to have the time displayed at all times like on a traditional watch, it really isn’t necessary either."

But isn't quick access TO THE TIME the main point of the watch?

My watch is superior to any digital watch. It only costs £30, and for that you get a WHOPPING battery life of about 3 years, WITH THE SCREEN ON 24/7!

You don't need to dock it, and you don't need to go without the time for a day if you don't put it on charge. You can also go to two events in one day whilst retaining full time viewing capabilities!

Although it can't take pictures of the sky or the inside of my shirt, or play music through a shitty speaker, it has a far greater pixel density, so fine it looks like the hands and numbers are actually real!

I suppose this "music" thing will have to be played through my phone. How savage.
 
When someone made a first pc that barely fit in a room and could only preform as a simple calculator. "I bet there was bitches like you all who moan owww but look my 0.99 cent watch can run for 3 years with a single battery".... and talk them of making that junky pc even tho it could only add some numbers for you, look what it evolved into.... smart watch will do the same give it some time.. If you not interested in product don't even criticize it.
 
When did it become acceptable to measure battery time in hours instead of days?

I had a PDA/Phone in the early 2000's that ran windows mobile 6.5 and its battery lasted 2 days. Before that we had regular cellphones that lasted a week on one charge.

WTH is up with 10hours? That barely covers the time spent at work, pretty much as soon as you get off from work your fancy watch-phone runs out of power?!

Ridiculous
 
When someone made a first pc that barely fit in a room and could only preform as a simple calculator. "I bet there was bitches like you all who moan owww but look my 0.99 cent watch can run for 3 years with a single battery".... and talk them of making that junky pc even tho it could only add some numbers for you, look what it evolved into.... smart watch will do the same give it some time.. If you not interested in product don't even criticize it.

But the calculator was something new, something that hadn't been done before, something that was not possible through ANY other manual means whatsoever.

But compared to this watch;

First Computer; Did a better job calculating than humans manually
Smart Watch; Can't even display the time better than a 300 year old mechanism

First Computer; Did something that nothing else was capable of doing
Smart Watch; Combines a .mp3 player and clock. But requires a phone. Which has a clock. And a .mp3 player.

Ordinary Watch; ADJUSTABLE STRAP.


I do see where you are coming from, but you are approaching it from the wrong context. You are assuming that we are anti-technology. I'm a huge tecchie, but only when it actually ACCOMPLISHES something worthwhile, without being some stupid fad at a stupid overinflated price, made through slave labour in China. (read: Apple devices)

This exists purely to extract money from hipsters who don't understand that they should buy the technically superior product, not the one that costs the most. Or performs better.

For example, take a kickstarter alarm. Can't find the link. Got funded within a week. It was 1 module that you had to place in the centre of a room, where a robber could take it. It was a humidity sensor and sound sensor that sent you a bump (not a text or call) when somebody MAY be in the house. You had three options;

Phone home (lol. Let's call the burglars)
Call the police (and get struck off the register for false alarms)
Call a neighbour (to which if they are out, oh well)

There was no audible alarm. Period.

The info page told us how "standard alarms have an annoying 99% false alarm rate," and that burglar alarms were over £10,000 MINIMUM, wheras their "revolutionary" product, only placeable in 1 room was a mere £3000.
 
When did it become acceptable to measure battery time in hours instead of days?

I had a PDA/Phone in the early 2000's that ran windows mobile 6.5 and its battery lasted 2 days. Before that we had regular cellphones that lasted a week on one charge.

WTH is up with 10hours? That barely covers the time spent at work, pretty much as soon as you get off from work your fancy watch-phone runs out of power?!

Ridiculous

It's funny really. They come up with these silly "smart" devices, that can't even operate a single day. Yet devices of old could run circles around them, do the general thing we want them to and last for weeks or years on a single battery.

All to keep up with the ADD tech generation we're raising, because nothing holds their attention for more than 5 seconds these days.Something taking too long? Better rage about it on Twitter or FB, about how slow your new device is. This is just silly nonsense.. guess I'm showing my ignorance, but I see it more of just useless than actually needed.
 
I bought the "Smart View" Sony Ericson maybe 2 years ago...still works, it may not be pretty but with all the independent plug-in apps you can get:
  • Time (I have an app that allows you to customize the clock face)
  • Weather
  • Answer/Ignore Calls (And auto-reply text option)
  • Social Media Feeds (In which all apps were uninstalled from my Droid, so I don't really use it)
  • Text messages
  • "Find your phone" - I hit a button, my phone rings.
  • GPS - If I'm driving, I can glance at my wrist which shows the mapping.
  • MP3 Player - Change songs while your running, without taking your phone out of your pocket.
  • And more customized plug-ins like dialing (My finger is the size of the screen, so that wouldn't work for me).
I paid maybe $35 for this.
 
I used to wear a wrist watch but then it broke. I realized after a while that I actually liked the feeling of not having anything on my wrist. The company ended up giving me a smart phone and it shows the time on it, so now I have a fancy pocket watch. I guess I could make a wrist strap for the smart phone and put it on my wrist. ;)
 
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