Samsung Galaxy Watch Debuting At IFA 2018, LG Releasing Two Wear OS Smartwatches

Samsung is expected to release the Gear S4 this year and it might actually end up being called the Galaxy Watch. A new report from South Korea claims that Samsung will unveil its new smartwatch next month, while LG might reveal two new smartwatches later this month.

Samsung will reportedly unveil the “Gear S3 successor” during IFA 2018 in Berlin, according to South Korean publication Yonhap News. IFA 2018 is scheduled to kick off on Aug. 31 and will go on until Sept. 5. The publication is also confident that the new smartwatch will actually be called the Galaxy Watch and not the Gear S4. Samsung has already registered the brand name in its home country and it already has a logo to go along with it.

There are already several rumors and leaks providing some information on the Galaxy Watch’s specs and features. The upcoming smartwatch is believed to arrive with a 470mAh battery and a chip manufactured in the PLP package process. The Galaxy Watch is also expected to be capable of measuring the user’s blood pressure. The device is also said to arrive with Bixby 2.0 and that Bixby Voice support will be fully operational at launch. Bixby 2.0 is expected to be announced on Aug. 9 alongside the Galaxy Note 9.

The Samsung Galaxy Watch is also rumored to arrive with a “new UX interaction.” What that exactly means is still a mystery, but it’s possible that users may have a new way of navigating the user interface with Samsung’s signature rotating bezel. The most important thing about the Galaxy Watch is that it’s rumored to run Google’s Wear OS, which was formerly known as Android Wear. This may surprise some users since Samsung has always used its Tizen OS for its smartwatches. The switch to Wear OS may have also triggered the change in the device’s brand name from Gear S to Galaxy Watch.

Speaking of Wear OS, the South Korean publication also said that LG will be debuting two new smartwatches running the same operating system. LG will reveal the two new Wear OS smartwatches “as early as this month.” There have been several sketchy rumors about one of these LG smartwatches from months ago, but no new information has surfaced since then, as pointed out by 9To5Google. The last smartwatch released by LG was the LG Watch Style, which debuted early last year.