Samsung teases Gear S2 circular smartwatch to be unveiled on September 3
Here is the first look at Samsung's new Gear smartwatch, coming next month — Samsung's big news today was two big phones, but it has even more tech to come shortly: a new smartwatch that's going to be unveiled next month.
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung has been telegraphing this watch all year: an April report laid out the two-variant Gear A plan — one Bluetooth-only, one with 3G and calling support — and weeks later the company itself confirmed the round face when it shipped the developer SDK in its next-gen Gear announcement. Today's tease puts a name and date on that pipeline: Gear S2, unveiled September 3, right alongside Samsung's new phones.
The reveal matters because it lands in the first full holiday cycle after the category's biggest incumbent reset the conversation, and Samsung is answering with a design break from the rectangular Gear line rather than a spec bump.
First-order effects
- Samsung shifts its wearable lineup onto a circular face, making the Gear S2 the company's flagship answer in a market where face shape has become the visible differentiator.
- Developers who took delivery of the round-face SDK in April now get the actual hardware to target, with a September 3 ship date anchoring their update timelines.
Second-order effects
- If the reported 3G-and-calling variant ships, wireless carriers gain a new connected-wearable SKU to bundle, pushing Samsung's watch strategy beyond phone-tethered accessory pricing.
- A successful round S2 forces the pace for Samsung's own roadmap — the corpus shows the line escalating within a year toward the sensor-heavy Gear S3 with altimeter, barometer, and integrated GPS, which then hit the US at $349 starting price.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to smartwatches consolidating into annual, sensor-stacked product cycles like phones — each generation adding standalone connectivity and health hardware rather than remaining simple companion screens.
- If the two-variant structure holds across generations, wearables split into a tethered tier and a carrier-distributed cellular tier, changing who sells watches and how they're priced.
The trend: Smartwatches are maturing from phone accessories into annually refreshed, sensor-rich products with optional cellular independence — and Samsung's round Gear S2 is one data point in that shift.