Samsung’s 6th smartwatch has a 3G modem and a massive curved display

Making a good product is hard, and if you don't have a solid vision, there's nothing like iteration to help get you there. Samsung has taken this strategy to heart in the smartwatch category, where, in less than a year, it has released the Galaxy Gear, Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo, Gear Fit, and Gear Live. Late last night, the company took the wraps off of smartwatch #6: The Samsung Gear S.

So what's new this time around? Well, as was rumored, the Gear S has a 3G modem and Wi-Fi—it's a standalone smartwatch. Until now, just about any mainstream smartwatch has been tethered to a smartphone to get internet access. The other big addition to the Gear S is a curved AMOLED display. The 2-inch 360×480 display is one of the biggest ever on a smartwatch; just look at the last two pictures in the gallery below for an idea of the size. It's almost a bracelet instead of a watch.

Other specs include a 1GHz dual-core processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, heart rate monitor, Bluetooth 4.1, 802.11a/b/n, GPS, and IP67 water resistance.

With a huge screen, 3G modem, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, we're starting to seriously worry about the battery life. Packed into the Gear S is a 300 mAh battery, which Samsung says is good for two days of "typical usage." That still seems like a very small battery for all of those power hungry components.

Despite Android Wear looking like the most promising wearable OS to date, the Gear S runs Samsung's Tizen, the same OS as the Gear 2. Samsung recently boasted that 1,000 apps had been made for Tizen wearables, so it looks like the company is slowly on its way to establishing an ecosystem. The bigger 360×480 display of the Gear S will be a good test of Tizen's flexibility, as the existing 1,000 apps were all designed for 320×320 displays.

Samsung's rapid-fire hardware spamming does seem to be narrowing down what the company wants in a smartwatch. With the Galaxy Gear, it learned that outward-facing cameras were no good. With the Gear Fit, the company learned that the flexible displays fit the form factor well, and with the Gear S, it's experimenting with bigger screens and standalone connectivity. The one standout smartwatch feature Samsung hasn't experimented with is a round display, which, ever since we first laid eyes on the Moto 360, seems like the defining characteristic of a good smartwatch. It looks like we'll have to wait for Samsung smartwatch #7 for that.