Samsung had its press conference at IFA in Berlin today and the thing everyone's talking about is the Gear S2, which is the first Samsung watch I've seen that actually looks like a watch instead of a rectangle strapped to your wrist. Round face, physical rotating bezel you twist to scroll through apps and notifications, comes in a plain version and a fancier "classic" one with a leather band for people who want their smartwatch to look like it belongs at a dinner meeting. Runs Tizen, not Android Wear, which is its own whole conversation I'll get to in a second.
I want to be clear that I've been pretty down on smartwatches as a category. I had a Pebble Kickstarter one for about eight months before the charging cable frayed and I never bothered replacing it, and honestly I didn't miss it much. Buzzing on my wrist to tell me an email arrived isn't a feature, its a leash. But the bezel thing on the Gear S2 is the first interaction idea from any of these companies that made me go "oh, that's actually smart" instead of "oh, that's a smaller phone screen now." You twist a physical ring to move between watch faces or scroll a list, you press the two buttons on the side for back and home. No swiping on a screen the size of a bottle cap with your thumb, which is how I ended up butt-dialing my own dentist once trying to dismiss a notification on a friend's Moto 360.
The Tizen thing matters more than it sounds like it should. Samsung's been pushing its own OS on watches since the original Gear, mostly because it doesn't want to be totally dependent on Google for its wearable line the way it is for phones. Whether that's good for anyone buying the thing is a different question — fewer apps than Android Wear, and it won't talk to iPhones at launch even though Samsung apparently wants that eventually. Pricing they mentioned on stage was $299 for the regular Gear S2 and more for the classic, which puts it right in the range of an entry Apple Watch, and I genuinely don't know which one wins that fight for a normal person who just wants to see texts without pulling out their phone. Round face is a real advantage though. Every rectangular smartwatch I've tried just looks like a shrunk-down phone, and something about a circle reads as "watch" to your brain in a way a rectangle never quite does, no matter how nice the software is.
Small aside, because I can't not mention it: Google also rolled out a new logo this week, the first real change to the wordmark in like sixteen years, sans-serif now, plus those four colored dots that show up while pages load instead of the old spinning throbber. I noticed it Tuesday morning on my phone before I saw a single article about it, just opened search and thought "wait, did my browser update wrong." It'll get its own post treatment somewhere on the internet a hundred times over the next week so I won't belabor it here, but between that and a round watch with a bezel you can actually feel under your finger, it's a decent little stretch for anyone who likes noticing small design choices most people won't ever consciously register.
Anyway. IFA runs through the weekend and there's supposedly more hardware coming out of Sony and a pile of TV manufacturers nobody outside Europe pays attention to, so I might do a follow-up if anything else catches my eye. For now I'm just sitting here twisting an imaginary bezel on my current very boring, very non-smart watch and wondering if I'm finally the kind of person who'd wear the smart kind.