Even before Smartphones were popularised by Samsung’s Galaxy Gear, manufacturers such as Sony and Pebble were already trying their luck in this new sub sector. These manufacturers may have been there before but they failed to entice and convince the target market to buy their smartwatches.
This all changed when Samsung entered the market with their Galaxy Gear. The Smartwatch itself was received with mixed emotions but still went ahead to be the most successful Smartwatch ever made. I was one of those who were not excited by the original Gear and I believe that Samsung could have done better job. I opted for the Sony Smartwatch which I thought had a good design overall and could support any Smartphone running Android.
Samsung may have done a poor job with the design and features of the Gear but they compensated this with the marketing efforts they put in that lead the Gear to be the most successful Smartwatch ever.
For those still doubting the Gear is the greatest Smartwatch ever, a new report by Strategic Analytics indicates that Samsung currently controls 71% of the Smartwatch market. The new report confirms that Samsung shipped over 500,000 smartwatches from January this year to take the largest piece of the Smartwatch pie. The 500,000 figure does not include the latest Smartwatch variants (the Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo) that were unveiled earlier this year. It is important to note that the number represents the smartwatches shipped to retailers and not the ones sold to end users. Either way, it is still a great number for Samsung.
Samsung may have enjoyed some kind of monopoly for quite a while now in the Smartwatch sector given that its rivals (Sony and Pebble) have not invested much on marketing. This Monopoly will definitely end soon as other manufacturers such as LG and Motorola have expressed interest and even confirmed they are working on their own smartwatches. LG announced the LG G watch while Motorola announced the Moto 360. Both look very good and much better than the Gears from Samsung. These manufacturers have even got the support of Google that announced Android Wear, a Smartwatch version of Google’s Android OS for mobile devices. Android Wear was announced a few hours before LG and Motorola announced their smartwatches and only time will tell how successful they will be against Samsung’s smartwatches that are currently running on Tizen.
