Samsung Begins Marketing Smartwatch That Doesn't Need A Smartphone

The day when consumers use wearables as stand-alone devices without the need for a smartphone has finally come, thanks to a new smartwatch.

Samsung just launched its Gear S2 Classic 3G smartwatch in Italy with Italian telecommunications provider TIM and in collaboration with Gemalto, the company responsible for the security in many mobile and credit card payments.

The smartwatch offers similar functions to other smartwatches on the market, like tracking fitness and receiving notifications, text messages and calls. However, the smartwatch can achieve all of this without needing to be connected to a smartphone.

Some other wearables are being developed with the same use case in mind, but are based around consumers transferring their current SIM card from their smartphone to the wearable in order to add connectivity.

Untethered connectivity coming to IoT devices might bring new opportunities for marketers and advertisers, but wearables won’t become a channel for messaging in the short-term, according to Marley Kaplan, head of innovation at Kinetic Worldwide.

“Wearables are not quite ready for mainstream ad networks,” Kaplan told the IoT Daily.

“However, this rollout on a global scale brings marketers one step closer to forming best practices around the activation of wearable data.”

In the Samsung smartwatch is Gemalto’s eSIM (embedded SIM), which the security powerhouse proposes will become the new standard to replace current SIM card technologies.

The eSIM can be remotely configured to manage service subscriptions to be used on a different network or in a different device and then consumers can simply insert the eSIM into that device with no further actions needed, according to Gemalto. The idea is to create a single standard that can enable connectivity both in IoT devices like wearables and also in smartphones and tablets.

“The rollout of the new Samsung watch is a huge technological leap toward a unified ecosystem of devices and platforms,” Kaplan told the Daily.

For now, the area of opportunity for marketers and advertisers is in leveraging the data collected from wearables to provide context, according to Kaplan.

 

Next story loading loading..