New Fitbit Smartwatch vs. Samsung Gear S4: Upcoming Wearables Compared

The new Fitbit smartwatch and the Samsung Gear S4 are among the most awaited smartwatches launched this year. While the Fitbit smartwatch will be company’s first attempt at making a multi-functional and not just fitness-centric wearable, the Gear S4 is expected to be more fitness centric than the company’s previous wearable.

While Samsung's plans to launch a Fitbit smartwatch were revealed in January, the company revealed plans to launch a fitness-centric wearable in a survey sent to the members of its SmartLab Plus program Wednesday. In addition to this, Samsung gear S4 is a successor to the company’s Gear S3 and is expected to follow the usual launch cycle around November this year.

Fitbit smartwatch

Unlike Samsung, Fitbit isn’t a smartphone company — it specializes in making fitness wearables. While Apple and Samsung’s smartwatches have functionality connected to their smart watches, Fitbit has designed independently functioning fitness wearables which either show fitness metrics on the smartwatch itself or on the connected app.

The upcoming smartwatch could be different. The company acquired prominent smartwatch companies such as Pebble and Vector recently and the Fitbit smartwatch is expected to gain functionality from these acquisitions.

The company’s CEO James Park told the Financial Times in July that new smartwatch would focus highly on endurance-based features and ones like an LTE radio. These entail that the upcoming Fitbit smartwatch would gain from or even provide improvements of the company’s existing fitness-related software. Chances are that the smartwatch could feature onboard GPS, which would be a massive improvement on the company’s current wearables, which come with connected GPS, which takes GPS feedback from connected smartphones.

Samsung Gear S4

Details about an upcoming Samsung wearable suggest that the upcoming device will be a hybrid of Gear S3 and Gear Fit 2 and mark the consolidation of the company’s smartwatch range. It wouldn’t be just an activity tracker, however, it will have fitness-centric features.

The device will also focus more on comfort with a thinner and replaceable watch straps.

Most importantly the device might be the first swim-proof smartwatch that comes with a display. Currently, swimmers who want to track their workout have to depend on fitness trackers such as Moov, which track activity while swimming but come sans a display. A swimmer has to wait for the smartwatch to sync to his/her smartphone to get activity metrics for swimming. The Gear S4 might change since it would be waterproof.

Read: Samsung In 2017: Galaxy S8, Note 8, Gear VR 3, Gear S4 Smartwatch And More

While both companies’ smartwatches will be launched later this year, the Samsung Gear S4 seems to be richer in terms of features, if rumors are to be believed.

Both smartwatches are expected to be more fitness centric than the ones currently available in the market, which highlights the fact that when it comes to wearables, users are looking for devices which serve specialized functions, rather than devices which basically become proxies of smartphones and show functions they would have seen on their smartphone anyway.