Samsung's new stand-alone cellular smartwatch, the Gear S2 Classic 3G, will be out on Friday, March 11th, the company announced today. We previously heard about the watch earlier this morning, but Samsung appears to have pushed out more information ahead of the annual Mobile World Congress expo, which begins February 22nd in Barcelona, Spain.
There's no pricing information yet, as Samsung is leaving the specifics up to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. This new Gear S2 is notable because it's the first device on the market to come equipped with the GSMA's new embedded eSIM specification, meaning the watch can be made to work with any of the above mentioned carriers at any time without having to remove the card inside. The Gear S2 Classic 3G comes with a 1.2-inch circular AMOLED display, a dual-core 1GHz processor, and about two days of battery life, Samsung says. The device runs Tizen and comes with 4GB of storage and 512MB of memory.
No word on pricing for the Gear S2 Classic 3G
The Gear S2 isn't the first product with a programmable SIM card. However, the new eSIM specification is backed by some of the industry's biggest names, including device manufacturers like Samsung, LG, Microsoft, and Huawei and telecoms like AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, and EE. "We don’t want the consumer to be disadvantaged compared to the current SIM model," GSMA's chief engineer Ian Pannell told The Verge. "We're putting the first specification out for companies that may want to launch products that are very simple." The new eSIM is also 90 percent smaller than a standard SIM card, Pannell noted.