Samsung have finally revealed just how much their next generation of wearables will cost.
The company have only stated the cost in Taiwanese dollars, though. The Fit will set you back 5,990 TWD, which equates to £119. The Gear 2 comes in at a steeper 8,990 TWD, or £177. There was no mentioning of the Gear 2 Neo, although due to its middling specs it should cost somewhere in between the two.
Of course those translated figures only apply if Samsung choose to price the devices in the West at the same price as in Asia, and if history is anything to go by they probably won’t. Still, we can at least fool ourselves for a little while longer.
For comparison’s sake, the Fit’s main rivals the Nike+ Fuel Band SE and the Jawbone Up are currently available in the UK for £129 and £99.99 respectively, making its pricing reasonable enough (providing it stays that low).
The fully-fleshed Gear 2 is a little shorter on competition. The Pebble is really the only other top-of-the-range smartwatch currently available, and it has several variants available at £151, £139 and £91 depending on your preferred material and design. So whilst it’s noticeably cheaper, it should also be remembered that the Pebble is considerably lower spec – it has a black and white display vs the Gear 2’s full-colour Super AMOLED, it doesn’t have a camera, and you cannot (without some fairly sizeable hackery at least) answer calls using it.
We won’t really know just how fair a price point the Gear 2’s provisional £177 is until we learn more about Android Wear. Hopefully we’ll soon have a release date for the Gear 2 range, and with that a concrete price.
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