Samsung: we’re working on a smartwatch too you guys!

The success of the Pebble Smartwatch on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter seems to have triggered a revolution.

Along with a slew of competitors from bit players, the big boys have started getting into the space. Apple is rumoured to be readying an iWatch and now Samsung has confirmed that it is launching its own Smart Watch.

The Smart Watch will form part of its Galaxy range, and if a Bloomberg interview with Lee Young Hee, executive vice president of Samsung’s mobile business, is anything to go by, it’s been looking to get into the smart watch space for a while now.

“We’ve been preparing the watch product for so long,” he said. “We are working very hard to get ready for it. We are preparing products for the future, and the watch is definitely one of them.”

As bizarre as that might sound given that smart watches are only just beginning to creep into the public imagination, the patents in Samsung’s arsenal actually back that up. Some relating to smart watches actually date back more than a decade as unwiredview notes.

Lee wouldn’t be drawn on what features the watch might have or how much it might cost, although he did say that whoever built a truly successful smart watch first would be able to gauge exactly what people might want from such a device.

“The issue here is who will first commercialize it so consumers can use it meaningfully,” Samsung’s Lee said.

If Samsung can capitalise on its various patents then it stands a chance, however slim, of beating Apple to the punch. That’s just one part of winning people over though. It’ll have to do more than anything Apple could produce and look better, something which it took a long time to get even close to doing with its smartphones.

In fact, it already pretty much did that with the launch of the S9110. That was before Android was really big though, and before people figured out that integrating a phone with a watch might be a little bit easier than trying to build a phone into a watch.