Rumors are swirling around Samsung’s next-gen smartwatches, but so far, they’ve focused mostly on whether Samsung would truly switch to Wear OS. Now that it’s been confirmed that the company is joining forces with Google, we’re waiting to see what that new watch will look like. Leaked renders of the Galaxy Watch Active 4 give us some clues.
The renders come courtesy of leakers @OnLeaks and GizNext (no relation to Gizmodo). At a glance, they don’t stray from the Watch Active line’s general aesthetic, but there are some slight changes. The lugs look slightly longer, there’s no more gap between the strap and the case, and the button shapes are also slimmer. According to GizNext, the watch will be made from aluminum, come in 40mm and 44mm case sizes, and will be powered by a new 5nm processor. The renders show black, silver, green, and gold options—though the leakers note that these shades might look different from the actual product. SamMobile claims that not only will the gold shade hew closer to rose gold, but there’ll also be a white option as well.
What the renders don’t show is a physical rotating bezel, but fans of Samsung’s most iconic smartwatch feature shouldn’t worry just yet. While the original Watch Active omitted the feature entirely, it came back on the Active 2—albeit as a touchscreen bezel.
The watch looks sleek as hell, but truthfully, renders won’t answer the most important questions on everyone’s minds. How will the new unified Tizen-Wear OS platform work, and what aspects of Tizen OS will remain? Last month at Google I/O, Samsung and Google both put the rumor mill to rest by confirming that they were indeed partnering on a new operating system called Wear. So far, we know the new Wear platform promises better battery life, a robust third-party app ecosystem, and faster performance. (Given that the Active 4 is supposed to have a 5nm SoC, that’s within the realm of possibility.) Not much was confirmed beyond that, so of course, all eyes will be on the Galaxy Watch Active 4 as an early indicator of how well Wear lives up to those promises.
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We probably won’t have to wait too long to see what this brave new post-Tizen world might look like. Samsung is expected to announce the Active 4 on June 28 at Mobile World Congress during an event titled “Galaxy Ecosystem/New Watch Experience/Mobile Security.” While we don’t know the specifics, “Galaxy Ecosystem” and “New Watch Experience” don’t exactly leave much up to the imagination.
Less clear is when we’ll see the rumored flagship Galaxy Watch 4. Our best guess is sometime in August. That’s generally when Samsung holds its fall product launch events, and the timing aligns with when Samsung announced the Galaxy Watch 3 last year.
