{"id":60547,"date":"2013-03-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-20T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joggingvideo.com\/tech\/mobile\/apple-iwatch-beware-samsung-plans-to-clock-you\/"},"modified":"2013-03-20T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T00:00:00","slug":"apple-iwatch-beware-samsung-plans-to-clock-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1800birks4u.com\/tech\/mobile\/apple-iwatch-beware-samsung-plans-to-clock-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple iWatch, beware. Samsung plans to clock you"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n Now that Samsung has said it’s working on a high-tech watch<\/a><\/span>, one that presumably will pack smartphone features, 2013 could shape up as the year of smartwatch wars, with longtime foes Apple and Samsung leading the battle.\n<\/p>\n The motivation, Wall Street analysts argue, is that the biggies need another act as growth of smartphones sales are already slowing. Could smartwatches become that act? It might sound like a long shot; many people already are abandoning watches and relying on their phones instead. And in an age of ever-expanding phone screens, a device for the wrist comes with obvious limitations.\n<\/p>\n Yet Samsung is publicly prepping for this fight. Apple has been mum amid a slew of reports that it has a team in Cupertino, Calif., working on the iWatch<\/a><\/span>, or whatever it might be called. Startup Pebble, meanwhile, has already gained a big fan base, showing that an app-filled watch that’s linked to a smartphone certainly has some eager customers.\n<\/p>\n For Samsung, however, this is hardly new terrain. Go back in Samsung history — to the heady days of 1999 — and you’ll find that Samsung was already pushing a Dick Tracy-like device. Why? Because the wireless market was “saturated.”\n<\/p>\n Here’s Samsung’s press release<\/a> about its first watch phone, the SPH-WP10:\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n The SPH-WP10 is Samsung’s first product developed as part of a market segmentation strategy designed to respond to the nearly saturated domestic market for wireless handsets. The new product signals new marketing approaches by domestic manufacturers to target specific generations of mobile telecommunications service users.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n At the very end of the announcement, the company adds: “Samsung officials expect their new watch phone to be a big hit with the youth market.”\n<\/p>\n With 90 minutes of talk time, a design that would probably get you an extra-special pat down when going through airport security, and a $700 price tag, the SPH-WP10 obviously did not set the world (or the youth market) on fire. Samsung tried again a decade later with the S9110, a much more svelte design that had nearly three times the talk time of the SPH-WP10, but still cost more than $600. Surprisingly, it never made it to the U.S., and was only available in France.\n<\/p>\n Samsung’s belief that the domestic handset market was “nearly saturated” was off too. That market was disrupted by the advent of smartphones, a market that’s grown so fast, and so large, that it overtook feature phones in worldwide sales<\/a><\/span> in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to IDC.\n<\/p>\n So why return to a product genre that failed to catch on twice, and as recently as four years ago? Things have changed, and so has Samsung.\n<\/p>\n In 1998 — the year before its first watch-phone — Samsung had just 60,000 employees and made $16.6 billion in revenue in the U.S. Now it has 236,000 employees, and did more than $188 billion in sales last year alone. Smartphones and other mobile devices made up nearly half of that.\n<\/p>\nA brief history of smartwatches (pictures)<\/h3>\n