Samsung is expected to unveil its Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic at its Unpacked event next week, and a leak has provided us with the new live images of one of the upcoming watches, courtesy of 91Mobiles. A pair of images show off the Galaxy Watch 4 in its Classic variant in both its black and silver colorways. The images match the renders uploaded earlier on Amazon, showing off the physical bezel and the side buttons.
More interestingly, these offer up our first glimpses of the OneUI watch interface, showing off its set up screens and not much else. To recap, Google and Samsung recently combined their smartwatch efforts, merging Tizen and Wear OS into a new smartwatch operating system announced at Google I/O in May. The new operating system represents a large upgrade over the previous Wear OS, with more focus placed on the value of animations and speedy performance for a pleasing user experience. Unlike previous iterations of Wear OS, Google is now allowing smartwatch maker to build their own interfaces over Wear, leading to Samsung creating its own OneUI interface for a more integrated experience with its own device family.
For Samsung and Google, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 represents their best chances of tackling Apple’s smartwatches and shaking up the company’s dominance over the wearable market. While there are a variety of Android smartwatches out in the wild being sold by an even wider variety of companies, statements from a Qualcomm executive this year reveal that Google and its partners have only managed to sell around 40 million smartwatches over the past five years. Samsung watches may have fared better, but as a whole have barely managed to capture 10% of the smartwatch market at its height, as per figures from Counterpoint Research. Apple, by contrast, is estimated to have sold 43.1 million watches in 2020 alone.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic are expected to debut alongside the Galaxy Z Fold 3, Galaxy Z Flip 3 5G, and a new pair of Galaxy Buds. An Amazon listing indicates that they’ll come with traditional smartwatch niceties, including Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi, NFC, GPS, body composition analysis, advanced sleep tracking, V02 Max, blood oxygen monitoring, and a heart rate monitor. As for pricing, the price is expected to be between $250 and $372. depending on which configuration or variant you buy.