Samsung eyes slice of watch mkt with Gear S3

Electronics giant Samsung is hopeful of carving a niche for itself in the Indian smart watch market with the launch of its Gear S3, priced at Rs 28,500.

"Even though wearables is a niche category, it is witnessing strong growth for us. Apart from smart features, we wanted to make sure the device also looks good. We drew inspiration from traditional timepieces," Samsung India Vice President Mobile Business Manu Sharma said.

He added that with Gear S3, the company hopes to address not just the smart watch but the watches category overall.

The smartwatch will come in two variants — Classic and Frontier.

The smartwatch features 1.3-inch circular super AMOLED display, 1GHz dual core processor and 768MB RAM.

Powered by Samsung's Tizen OS, the device has 380mAh battery. Wearable devices shipment in India clocked over 5.67 lakh units in the April-June quarter, up about 42 per cent from the January-March quarter 2016, as per research firm IDC.

Basic wearables — defined as wearables that can’t run third party applications — contributed nearly 94 per cent to the sales.

GOQii had 16.1 per cent market share, followed by Xiaomi (10.3 per cent), Fitbit (6.7 per cent), Garmin (1.4 per cent) and Huawei (1 per cent).