The first purported marketing images of the Samsung Galaxy Watch 6 series have appeared online, and it looks like a bittersweet concoction. The renders come courtesy of the ever-reliable Roland Quandt at Winfuture, who recently leaked details of the upcoming Samsung foldables as well.,
Right off the bat, the standard Galaxy Watch 6 seems identical to the Galaxy Watch 5, which in turn looks like an honest replication of the Galaxy Watch 4 aesthetics. Just like Apple, Samsung hasn’t played around with the core design language of its smartwatches for the past few generations. It’s distinctive, but at this point in time, it’s also getting stale.
It looks like Samsung will be offering the Galaxy Watch 6 in the usual black, silver, and an understated beige trim. A few Samsung Store-exclusive colors might also be in the pipeline, but we don’t have any credible leaks about that possibility. Samsung also appears to have left the strap design untouched, aside from a new quick-release button near the case.
For folks that loved the looks of Samsung’s previous-gen wearables, this is good news. It’s not a bad design by any stretch of the imagination, and the build quality seems top-class, too. But for the rest of us, waiting for Samsung to release some smartwatch firecrackers at the Unpacked event in July, it’s about to get boringly repetitive.
But that’s not where the tale ends. The Galaxy Watch 6 Classic variant is bringing back the physical rotating bezel. Great! But in doing so, the Galaxy Watch Classic 6 generously apes the two-year-old Galaxy 4 Classic’s looks, down to the red accent on the upper side button. That doesn’t sound particularly great!
The Classic variant will be up for grabs in metallic silver and black color options. The only discernible change is that the supplied strap appears to have a leather finish, complete with stitches on either side. Another difference is that the display will be slightly bigger on this one.
Samsung will offer the Galaxy Watch 6 in 40mm and 44mm sizes, while the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic will be sold in 43mm and 47mm variants. Both the models will be available in Bluetooth and LTE configurations, but there’s no word on estimated pricing yet.
Samsung isn’t changing much in the resilience department, either. Both the smartwatches will offer the standard 5ATM ingress protection, while Sapphire Glass will protect the round OLED display. It looks like Samsung is banking more on the side of meaningful internal upgrades than flashy looks.
For example, Samsung might finally upgrade to the new Exynos W930 for its smartwatches. This one is expected to offer a 10% bump in processing firepower compared to the Exynos W920 used inside the Galaxy Watch 4 and Watch 5 series. Rumors suggest that the Exynos W930 might not be an entirely new chipset but just a slightly overclocked batch of the Exynos W920.
So far, we haven’t come across any reliable leaks about next-gen biosensing health features. Tricks like blood glucose level monitoring are still said to be stuck in development hell and at least a couple of years away. It seems the most exciting aspect of the Galaxy Watch 6 series would be the Wear OS 4 software and how Samsung optimizes it with a dash of its own UI tricks to make the new smartwatches stand out.
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