A new study has found that Samsung is leading the way in the smartwatch race, shipping a reported 500,000 devices during the opening three months of the year.
Although this half a million figure relates to devices shipped to sellers as opposed to units on consumers’ wrists, it still leaves Samsung with a dominant 71 per cent share of the global smartwatch market for Q1 2014.
With the Samsung Gear 2 and Samsung Gear 2 Neo not hitting retailers until April, the company’s Q1 smartwatch sales related only to the original Samsung Galaxy Gear.
As well as helping Samsung to a dominant footing in the smartwatch market, the 500,000 unit Q1 shipping figures, highlighted by a Strategy Analytics report, equates to half of all the smartwatches shipped by the company throughout the whole of 2013.
Despite its current dominance, we don’t anticipate Samsung will hold such a stranglehold on the smartwatch space for much longer.
With the company’s most recent smartwatch efforts impressing without ever fully exciting, Samsung is to face renewed competition in the coming months from the Android Wear powered pairing of the LG G Watch and Motorola Moto 360.
With the LG G Watch set to launch on May 27, Motorola last week claimed that all existing smartwatchs – including Samsung’s offerings – are “crappy.”
“Moto 360 is a really cool device that we think solves a lot of problems that no one else has solved in the wearables space,” Mark Randall, Motorola’s Senior Vice President of Supply Chain and Operations told TrustedReviews.
He added: “We look at the 360 and we look at what everyone has done in that space. To be honest we think they are all pretty crappy.”
Read More: Samsung Gear Fit
