Samsung said to be working on the Gear Sport successor, codenamed Pulse
It looks like Samsung is working on the Gear Sport successor. Codenamed Pulse, development on the watch started in early December.
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The news comes from SamMobile. They’ve obtained info on a watch labelled with model number SM-R500 and initial software version R500XXEoARL5.
Back in August, Samsung made its Galaxy Watch official signifying a shift from the Gear brand. It would make sense, therefore, for the Gear Sport successor to be called Galaxy Sport. What is slightly puzzling, though, is the model number. Gear Sport is labelled SM-R600, so the SM-R500 may not be a full upgrade. Samsung had followed the usual naming convention for its Galaxy Watch (SM-R8xx versions SM-R7XX for Gear S3).
Released just over a year ago, Gear Sport was designed to offers a blend of fitness tracking and smartwatch functionality in one slick package. The device is extremely smart looking and its full colour, always-on, 1.2-inch circular screen with a 320 x 320 resolution is very vibrant and colorful.
Under the hood there is an accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer, heart rate sensor, ambient light and built-in GPS. In addition to tracking your fitness, the timepiece supports company’s Samsung Pay service with its NFC hardware, plus you can download music and store it directly on the watch.
The successor has the same 4GB of internal storage and also runs the Tizen operating system. Little other info is known so it’s all down to guess-work at this stage. As safe to say Galaxy Sport will come with design tweaks, performance upgrades and perhaps a boost in battery life. The current version runs up to 4 days / 4 hours of continuous GPS operation. LTE connectivity is unlikely considering this is a sports watch, but different sizes may be on the cards as Gear Sport only comes in the 1.2 inch screen version.
SamMobile have also learned that Galaxy Sport will come with Bixby on-board. Introduced in 2012, this is Samsung’s virtual assistant. A software update is expected to bring this functionality to the Galaxy Watch line at some point, too.
It’s unclear when the new Galaxy Sport will see the light of day. It could launch alongside the Galaxy S10 smartphone which is expected to land in the first quarter of 2019. Although if development only started a month ago, to us a Summer release date seems more likely. We’ll keep an ear out for any news and update this article as and when we hear more.
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