Samsung Gear Live

~ the eulogy ~

On 25 June 2014 Google walked onto the I/O stage with a version of Android built for wrists and two watches to prove it ran. One was LG's. The other came from Samsung, which by that point had already shipped four wearables under the Gear name and had written the software for every one of them itself.

The Gear Live cost $199 in the United States and Canada and £169 in Britain. It had a 1.63 inch Super AMOLED panel at 320 by 320, a Snapdragon 400 behind it, half a gigabyte of memory and a heart rate sensor on the underside. The body was steel, the rating was IP67, and the strap was a standard 22mm you could swap for any other. For a first-generation device it was solidly built, and the reviews mostly landed on the same two complaints: you could not read the screen outdoors, and the charging cradle was miserable.

On 14 May 2015 it came off the Google Store. Eleven months on sale, no replacement announced, and no second Samsung watch running Google's watch software for another six years.

~ the dossier ~

~ two watches, one platform ~

Android Wear shipped with the Gear Live and the LG G Watch on the same morning, and that was deliberate. Google wanted the platform to read as Android rather than as one manufacturer's gadget. Both were square and both arrived before anybody had worked out what a watch application was supposed to do. Motorola's round Moto 360 landed that September and took all the attention, because it was the one that looked like a watch instead of a shrunken phone.

Samsung never published a sales figure for the Gear Live. After the launch press release it also never really mentioned the thing again. No campaign, no follow-up, just a product sitting in Google's store next to a competitor running the identical operating system.

~ where it was not sold ~

It went on sale in eleven countries during 2014, starting in North America and reaching Europe and Asia over the following month. Turkey was not one of them, and neither was anywhere else in the region. The first wave of Android Wear was a thing you read about on Turkish hardware forums in 2014 and could not walk into a shop and buy, which is most of why the whole generation registered here as news rather than as objects.

~ why samsung walked ~

The answer was Tizen. The Gear S shipped in October 2014, four months after the Gear Live, running Samsung's own Linux-based system on a curved screen with a cellular radio of its own. The Gear S2 followed in 2015 with the rotating bezel that became the signature of the line. Samsung had a wearable platform it controlled end to end and no reason to keep building hardware for Google.

Android Wear did not thrive without them either. Google renamed it Wear OS in March 2018, four years into a platform that had never found its audience, and by then most of the original hardware partners had drifted off.

~ the long way back ~

In August 2021 Samsung shipped the Galaxy Watch4 on Wear OS, co-developed with Google, and quietly retired Tizen from the watch line. Six years after the Gear Live was pulled, Samsung was back on Google's platform, and this time the watches sold in the millions. The Gear Live is the ancestor nobody at that launch brought up.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »