After a rocky start, the wearable market is finally hitting its stride. The 900-pound gorilla of the Apple Watch is set to launch next month, and the incredible success of the Pebble Time’s crowdsourcing campaign proves there is a demand for wearables.

But what happened between the initial launch of the wearable form factor and today? App stores have matured. Initially the bulk of the apps on the app stores for many wearables were limited to basic sports and health functionalities. This may have appealed to a small, loyal market but the mainstream consumer wants something more. The powers that be have listened, and app stores expanded.

With the broadening of app stores, wearables suddenly came a hot commodity and the market took off.

“Wearable devices have exploded into the consumer consciousness in the last two years and, when use cases become established, they will be the ‘next big thing’ in consumer electronics,” Juniper Research noted in a recent white paper. “Exactly what that ‘thing’ is varies considerably depending on the market segment and purpose of the devices.”

Gartner Research is equally as bullish, predicting that the market will grow to 26 million units in 2016. This is up from a mere 100,000 in 2014.

Considering the chart below from Business Intelligence, there’s a direct correlation between correlation between the strength of the app store and the demand for the specific wearable.

The Pebble’s app store leads the way with approximately 1000 apps. Contrast that to the Galaxy Gear smartwatch, with a paltry 70 apps, and its easy to see the connection.

The next generation of wearables will likely have an even stronger emphasis on apps, as when the market gets more mature it’s bound to get more competitive. Consumers will want their wearables to become more and more independent from their smartphones, and app designers will have to take note and build apps accordingly.

Vendors that fail to nurture the development of robust app stores will be faced with their devices failing to gain altitude. Consumers will simply not be interested in them and will instead pick up something with more app offerings.

The post Want a Successful Wearable? Build It A Solid App Store appeared first on VR World.

Samsung (KRX: 005930) is in a tough position in the smartwatch market. The company has released more devices than any other major player — a total of six — but not all of them have been a stunning success. In fact, it’s first venture into the field, the Galaxy Gear, had a stunningly high return rate of 30%.

But there have been some successes in the field. The Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo smartwatches had a much better reception than the initial Galaxy Gear. But this year with the launch of the Galaxy 6 and Galaxy 6 edge, there was no companion smartwatch.

Why? Because Samsung says it needs to take a pause from the market.

“We’ve been introducing more devices than anybody else,” Samsung Mobile Marketing Executive Vice President Young-hee Lee said to the Wall Street Journal in an interview. “It’s time for us to pause. We want a more perfect product.”

The smartwatch market is about to become a lot more competitive. As VR World discussed earlier there is still a demand for smart watches. The success of the crowdfunding campaign for the Pebble Time is proof of this. Samsung is wise to decide to step back from the market  and reassess its strategies. There will be a lot to learn from the Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) Watch, as well as the upcoming release of the Pebble Time.

Samsung’s first product, the Galaxy Gear, felt rushed. It was buggy and was light on functionality. It will be interesting to see what lessons Samsung can learn during its pause.

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Google recently released Android Wear, their new platform for wearables that currently has only three devices running it. The first two to be released were the LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live. Within the last couple days the Motorola Moto 360 was released for sale. These are the first generation of Google powered smart watches.

Samsung’s Gear Live offering is a nice piece with a few nice features. The body of the watch has a metal housing with a plastic back that incorporates an optical heart rate monitor and the charging contacts. The charger is essentially a backpack that hugs the contacts on the underside of the watch. The watchband is 22mm straps made of nice feeling plastic that has a metal tip that buttons into the band’s holes. This part is user replaceable and the securing method doesn’t seem as a buckle would be.

The interface for Android Wear is made up of cards, just like Google Now. It essentially will show you everything on the watch that would normally show up in your notification area on Android. Some like Google’s own apps will have nice cards, while others are really just the text from the notification. Using the interface is mostly swiping cards to close or expand them and move through the cards. Currently, there are not too many decent apps that can be found in the Play Store. The Navigation app’s tiles are by far some of the best uses of the watch. While driving there is no need to keep looking at your phone and the next directions will be fed to new tiles that are alerted by vibrating. Using it while going on a road trip to a new area was very pleasant since more time was spent watching traffic than down at the phone’s screen.

The Gear Live is IP67 certified for dust and water resistance, this equates to it is dust tight and withstanding immersion in 1m for a duration of 30m. It will be just fine in the shower, but probably not something that should be taken to the pool. The heart rate monitor and pedometer are not too accurate and should be used as a best guess for the info they provide. The battery is very small at 300mAh and can only last for a day of use. The display is a brilliantly vivid Super AMOLED touchscreen though does have the shortcoming in this design of having no ambient light sensor. The display will dim and then wake (brighten) when the wrist is rotated to view the watch face, but many times this had to be done upwards of 4 or more times to get a response. The voice commands are the same as Google Now, as it uses that app on the phone to complete everything.

Is it worth it?

Coming in at $200 this makes it an attractive price for such a gadget, though with the glaring drawbacks that this has it may be advisable to wait for the next generation. The fact that this has only a days worth of battery is the biggest drawback since you will need to charge it often, unlike the Qualcomm Toq. Having this rely on a constant Bluetooth connection means that it will drain your phone’s battery as long as it is connected. Overall, this is a great start, but there are many reasons to check what is on the horizon of Android Wear before deciding on the Gear Live.

The post Will Samsung's Gear Live Change Your Opinion On Smartwatches? appeared first on VR World.

Woot.com, an online discount website owned by Amazon just released its latest ‘deal of the day’. And what a deal it is, slashing the price of an Galaxy Gear Smartwatch by 46%, from $349.99 to mere $159.99. Is it enough to kick the sale volume up?

Woot! now offers Galaxy Gear smartwatch for $159.99

As you can see on the screenshot above, you cannot order more than a single unit of the watch, but opening multiple accounts isn’t exactly a problematic thing to do. If you want to, of course.

By all accounts, Galaxy Gear failed to land on the sweet spot of tens of millions of Galaxy smartphone customers, which wasn’t helped by an utterly creepy and stereotypical advertising campaign which looks like it was created by a member of tech bro gang in a Starbucks somewhere in the new San Francisco. ‘Revenge of Geeks Creepers’, that is.

Still, $159.99 is just $10 more than a regular Pebble, which doesn’t feature a camera or a colored LCD screen (no touch capabilities either) but has a larger ecosystem (apps). If you own a compatible phone (Galaxy SIII, S4, S5, Note II, Note III or a similar Android 4.x running device), the $160 price tag does not look too bad for checking the technology out. The original price of $299.00 was simply overrated for a first generation product.

Naturally, you could wait until this Friday (April 11th) and get a Galaxy Gear 2 watch without camera for $199.99, or wait until the end of the month and get a camera-equipped model for of $299.99.

You can also watch our video review of the Galaxy Gear below

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