As the great smartwatch battle looms on the horizon, one big upcoming combatant is Samsung. The South Korean tech giant is looking at the area of wrist-based wearables and has its device ready to go.
Right now we know that the watch is called the Samsung Galaxy Gear, which Samsung confirmed after a recenttrademark filing outed the name.
We also know a few things about the smartwatch's features, which currently suggest the Gear is really looking to bring the smartphone experience to the wrist. So what else has Samsung got in store?

Samsung Galaxy Gear release date

The Samsung Galaxy Gear will touch down on September 4 at IFA 2013 - that's a fact confirmed by Lee Young-hee, executive vice president of Samsung's mobile business.
The watch will be unveiled alongside the Galaxy Note 3, which is also confirmed to be arriving at Samsung's Unpacked: Episode 2 event.
An IFA launch will put it ahead of Apple's own rumoured foray into the wearable domain, the iWatch, though just behind Sony which launched theSony Smartwatch 2 in June.
As for when we'll see the Gear on the market, one insider reckons it will arrive on the last week of September.

Samsung Galaxy Gear design and specs

With all things wearable, form is as important as function, and some information on the Gear's design has also been outed over the past few weeks.
First, we're hearing that the watch will come in five colours. It will be available in white, orange, grey and black from the last week of September, and in gold a week after that.
Some sketches published in the same Galaxy-outing trademark hinted at what Samsung might have had in mind and the fact the design included a flexible display immediately grabbed our attention.
However these hopes were later dashed by Samsung, which confirmed that a flexible screen is not going to feature just yet. Sorry guys.
Samsung Galaxy Gear
Is Samsung about to go full flexible?
As for the specs, a recent report reckons the Gear is opting for a 2.5-inch square OLED display. We also hear that the Gear could feature a Exynos 4212 SoC along with 1GB of RAM.

Samsung Galaxy Gear: Android for your arm?

Until recently, we'd understood that the Samsung Gear was a name the company was floating for its wearable. But now we know that it will be named the Galaxy Gear, that new middle name could be a key indicator of what will be on offer.
First, this means the Gear could be slotting into Samsung's Galaxy ecosystem, which makes perfect sense if the watch will be communicating with our smartphones and tablets.
Plus it would also suggest that Samsung could be opting for an Android operating system, given that this is the software that binds its Galaxy devices together.
And sure enough we've heard that Gears sent out to developers have been running on either an Android 4.1 or 4.2 interface, so we'd expect it to have at least the latter when it hits the market.
How close this imitates the full phone Android experience remains to be seen, but we'd expect it to have been chopped up and remolded a bit for the diminutive display.
The same source to claim an Android appearance also said that Samsung will offer a watch app for phones and tablets that will communicate with the Gear instantaneously. This means if you're halfway through reading a message on your wrist, you can switch to your phone and it will pick up exactly where you left off.
This app is said to be appearing on the Samsung App store and not the Google Play store - could this mean we'll need a Samsung phone in order to get full functionality out of the Gear?
Galaxy screens
Android hits the tiles?

Samsung Galaxy Gear features

That's all well and good but what will the Galaxy Gear bring to our lives? Again, a lot of this has come out in the discovered trademarks.
The most recent of which describes "wearable digital electronic devices in the form of a wristwatch, wrist band or bangle capable of providing access to the Internet and for sending and receiving phone calls, electronic mails and messages."
This all makes it sound like the Gear is going for the whole "smartwatch on your wrist" angle, and may not be so interested in the fitness area - something that we're expecting Apple's iWatch to go big on.
However, it seems the watch will act as more of a secondary device to your smartphone and won't actually be able to make calls on its own. Instead it will connect to your phone or tablet via Bluetooth and NFC.
Earlier this year we reported on some leaked screens that claimed to belong to the Gear. As these only appeared on a Korean message board, we'd throw an extra scoop of salt on it all.
While they show off a very Windows Phone 8-like tile interface, we'd say it looks like more of a custom Samsung OS. This could throw a bit of water on the Android fire, though it could also be Android in a fancy new suit.
Note the icons too: that folded paper looks very much like a map to us, and GPS is one feature we're very much expecting to see in the onslaught of smartwatches.
Oddly, one of the screens refers to the watch as the Samsung Galaxy Altius. However this was also the Galaxy S4's codename, so we'd say it's unlikey to be what Samsung's naming its watch.
With September 4 just around the corner, it won't be long until we know for sure.