Whether by coincidence or the natural evolution of design, all candy bar smartphones share a common DNA. The age of the Blackberry is long gone, and every candy bar smartphone available today has a rectangular display with a notch, a cutout, or rarely, a hidden selfie camera.
Apple claims that Samsung stole its iPhone design, which essentially means that every other Android phone manufacturer did the same. Whether or not that’s true is a topic for another time, but most smartphones indeed look alike.
Regardless, in light of Apple’s recent jabs at Samsung and the accusations that the latter company lacked imagination when it developed its first Galaxy smartphone, I thought it would be fun to flip the script around. Let’s look at one of the market segments in which Samsung doesn’t seem to care what Apple’s doing.
Galaxy smartwatches have never tried to be Apple Watches
Although Apple can argue that every candy bar-shaped Galaxy handset today is inspired by the original iPhone on some deeply fundamental level, the company certainly couldn’t get away with claiming the same thing about the smartwatch market. The reason is simple: Samsung doesn’t seem to care about Apple’s smartwatch designs. It never did.
The Apple Watch is the most successful smartwatch on the market by far. Even so, Samsung has yet to try to emulate its success by copying Apple’s design. The Galaxy Watch and the Apple Watch couldn’t be more different if they tried, and I must say, Samsung deserves some props for sticking to its vision and not trying to copy Apple’s rectangular smartwatch.
More so, Samsung deserves a bit of recognition for empowering an entire market outside of Apple’s ecosystem. Numerous other smartwatch OEMs have followed in Samsung’s footsteps rather than Apple’s and created their own circular smartwatches.
As far as global shipments go, Apple seemingly has a winning recipe on its hands, but Samsung appears confident enough in its own concoction. And it is refreshing, to say the least, especially given Samsung’s history of indecisive smartphone design choices.
The company already had a couple of chances to drastically change the design of its Galaxy Watches over the past few years — in 2021 when it transitioned from Tizen OS to Wear OS and even this year with the cancelation of the Classic model.
Samsung never seemed to have questioned its decision to create circular smartwatches, and true to what has become a tradition by now, the upcoming Galaxy Watch 5 series also has a circular display.
Credit where credit is due. Samsung is keeping its originality, despite the success of the Apple Watch. But still, the question remains: should Samsung try to copy Apple’s success and steal some of its market share by creating its own rectangular Galaxy Watch variant? Or should the Korean tech giant continue ignoring Apple’s designs and stay 100% true to the circular dial formula? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.
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