A few months back, Samsung unveiled the long-rumored Galaxy Gear smartwatch, which surprisingly appears to be a big flop. Actually, we’re not sure about it, but many retailers across the globe were offering it for a discount, and one of the major reasons for its failure is the high $299 price tag, in addition to the compatibility with a limited number of Galaxy handsets that received the Android 4.3 update.
Anyway, a new report from BusinessKorea, citing related industry suggest that Samsung managed to sell under 50,000 units of the Galaxy Gear to date with the daily sales of 800-900 units.
Samsung Galaxy Gear received it’s fair share of criticisms: the smartwatch has a 30% return rate at Best Buy, in addition to the negative reviews from the tech community. The company recently released an update that brings full notifications to the Galaxy Gear, but they’re not going to help until it comes with support for more devices. Although Samsung announced several Galaxy handsets which will get Galaxy Gear compatibility in the near future.
The same industry sources also mentioned that Samsung Galaxy Round failed to make an impact as well. According to the report, the company managed to sell under 10,000 devices of the Galaxy Round, or 100 devices daily. The report also mentions that the Galaxy Round was released as a test device to gain the title of the manufacturer with the first curved display smartphone.
But, that will only happen with the Android 4.3 update, which is currently available for Galaxy S4. And, not to forget that Samsung Galaxy S3 did release the update that was full of bugs and problems, and forced the Korean OEM to stop the rollout and fix the issues that haunting S3 owners such as poor battery timing, random freezing of the handset and many more.
Samsung didn’t release the official sales figure yet, but we doubt they’ll do it any time soon. Although we can expect a more polished and better version of Gear to be released in the future.
Source: BGR
Updated 19th November 2013 11.08am GMT
It looks like this report of 50,000 Galaxy Gear devices is incorrect, as Samsung has now announced that the have shipped 800,000 Galaxy Gear devices, full details here.
Have a look at our Best Smartwatch 2014 guide for more information on the best smart watches available at the moment.
Filed Under: Gadgets News, Technology News