Even with its head start in the smartwatch market, Samsung wasn’t even able to come close to being as successful as Apple was within just a few months of releasing the Apple Watch. Clearly Apple knows something that Samsung doesn’t, which is why the company apparently took a lot of inspiration from the Apple Watch with the upcoming Galaxy Gear 2, which isn’t really a bad thing considering how nice the Apple Watch’s interface is.
Samsung’s Unpacked event on Thursday brought more than a blown-up S6 Edge and a new Note — the company also gave a sneak peak at the next version of its Galaxy Gear smartwatch, a significant update that takes more than a few cues from Apple’s own wearable. The Gear S2 — Galaxy branding is apparently passé in the fashion world — is round, unlike its rectangular forebears. It also seems to be running Samsung’s own Tizen operating system, rather than Google’s Android Wear, which powered the first-gen Gear. With the form factor shift comes a new user interface, which features a group of round icons that look somewhat familiar. What seems to be a dialer is nearly identical to the Apple Watch’s Friends view; the Weather icon swaps the sun to the right-rear of the cloud. In sum, Samsung seems to have returned to the strategy it employed during its “crisis of design” in the wake of the iPhone’s release.
