The battle for your wrist is about to intensify as details regarding Google's upcoming smartwatch have leaked.
2014 is shaping up to be the year of the smartwatch, as our favorite smartphone and tablet makers make a push to get us to carry another device. Samsung recently announced its second smartwatch, the Gear 2 alongside its upcoming flagship, Galaxy S5 smartphone.
With the Gear 2, Samsung is attempting to address many of the issues that plagued the first generation smartwatch. Sales of the Galaxy Gear have been very low and the device reportedly had an extremely high return rate. To try and turn things around, Samsung decided to use its own Tizen OS to power the watch this time around, instead of Android, hence why "Galaxy" was dropped from its name. The company has also made the smartwatch thinner and lighter than its predecessor and was able to improve its battery life from about 25 hours of use in the Galaxy Gear to 2-3 days of typical use with the Gear 2.
While Samsung has shifted gear from Android by moving to Tizen, Google is just about to begin its smartwatch future. The company just announced that it would be releasing an SDK to developers for Android wearables in two weeks and the news comes just as a new report claims to reveal the specs of Google's upcoming LG manufactured smartwatch.
The always-reliable @evleaks took to Twitter and posted what we can expect in Google's first smartwatch. The device will reportedly use a 1.65-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 280 x 280, which is actually lower than Samsung's Gear 2, which has a 320 x 320 display. It will match the Gear 2 by using 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage. The tipster says that the choice of processor hasn't been finalized, but we should probably see something similar to the Gear 2's 1GHz dual-core processor.
It's unclear if the LG built smartwatch will become part of Google's Nexus brand of devices or be offered as a Google Play Edition, which currently includes smartphones and tablets from Samsung, HTC, LG, and Sony. The smartwatch is expected to be officially announced at Google I/O, which takes place on June 25 through June 26.
