IFA 2016 – It’s all in the wrist with Samsung’s new Gear S3 smartwatch

Last year, Samsung’s Gear S2 smartwatch proved to be a pleasant surprise. It looked like a real timepiece and had the functionality to match. Better yet, it was water resistant so you didn’t have to coddle it like a candle in a typhoon. At IFA 2016, they took the wraps off their successor to the Gear S2. Enter the Gear S3.

The most immediate difference that you notice with the Gear S3 is that it’s somewhat bigger than the Gear S2, almost chunky even. On paper, the Gear S3 is 46mm wide and weighs 62g without the watchband factored in while being 12.9mm thin. The Gear S2 is  lighter at 47g, and is slightly smaller and thinner with a 42.3mm face and an 11.4mm thinness. That increase is weight and girth on the Gear S3 is fortunately put to good use as it has an array of upgrades all around that include GPS, a larger battery, built-in speakers, Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) support for payments at older swipe-only credit card terminals (Samsung Pay comes standard too) and a larger display. Naturally, the Gear S3 is also water resistant to the tune of an IP68 rating.

The Gear S3 Classic

The Gear S3 has a larger 1.3-inch, 360 x 360 pixel Super AMOLED display which has the same resolution as the Gear S2’s smaller 1.2-inch display though it’s now able to display a full array of colours when idle unlike the Gear S2 that stuck to a basic array of 8 hues when idle on your wrist. Both the Gear S2 and S3 still run on a dual-core 1Ghz processor though the Gear S3 has a firmware upgrade on their homebrewed Tizen OS with several functionality tweaks. Chief among them is additional functionality with the watch bezel such as the ability to twist it to take calls or to snooze an alarm. You’re also able to take advantage of the larger display by scrawling emoji or text which will convert into their digital equivalents so you can create short reminders or messages.

The Gear S3 comes in two different flavours – the Classic and the Frontier. The Classic is a shiny, gentleman’s watchpiece with chromed accents and a look that will do nicely with a power suit. The Frontier has aesthetics akin to more rugged, sportier watches with a chunky bezel and a matte black finish. Oh, it also has LTE connectivity too.

The watches come with a 22mm standard watchband which means that you’ll be able to swap them out with almost any other watchband if you so desire while the 380mA battery is, on paper, rated for four days of use before needing a charge. There’s no prices yet or a Malaysia launch date but we’ll keep you posted on any developments.

https://youtu.be/ynTB211p1PQ