Yesterday a series of screen grabs were uploaded to a South Korean discussion board. The screen grabs show what is thought to be a smartwatch display. Several of the screens contain the logo/branding “Samsung Galaxy Altius”. SamMobile published the screens, though it warned that several things indicate that the screens may be just the product of a hoaxer’s imagination.
Let’s have a look at the screenshots; I’ve compiled some of the key screens below.
We can see above a the splash screen, lock screen and application screen displays. They look smart and minimal but with enough thought put into the design to make them look modern, with large finger-friendly active application blocks, a bit like another “modern UI” we are all familiar with. SamMobile points out that there is a lot of un-Samsung like things about this. “The UI doesn’t meet Samsung’s UX guidelines and Samsung never uses mirror effect on their branding” suggests the Samsung obsessed tech site.
Another little niggle is visible on the close-up single screenshot, above, the status messages on the upper right of the screen describes something as “code Altios”, is that a misspelling of “Altius”? SamMobile has one further cause for doubting the screenshot series authenticity and that is because “Samsung doesn’t use codenames on their splash screen”.
The Altius name is one that has recently been bandied about with reference to the highly anticipated Samsung Galaxy S IV smartphone. Could it be that hoaxers have simply used the Altius code name to add a bit more believability to their smartwatch UI mock-ups? It looks like that is the case. However this is an interesting diversion and if Apple have a 100 strong team working on an iWatch smartwatch surely Samsung are spending some time and effort looking at such devices.
A Samsung smartwatch concept picture found upon UberGizmo
