Samsung Spectacles, a Design Patent for Google Glass Competitor Spotted

A new design patent has been spotted, revealing Samsung’s plans for a Google Glass competitor. As you can see in the images below, the design is pretty similar to Glass, though it looks a bit more sporty. The biggest difference between Google Glass and this one is that Samsung’s heads-up gadget is connected to the smartphone through an USB cable, instead of Bluetooth, which means it’s less bulkier, because it doesn’t feature a battery.

While the Samsung Spectacles will be lighter and might look nicer, it might not be so appealing to connect them to the smartphone through an USB cable, as people usually prefer WiFi or Bluetooth instead of cables. It seems like Samsung is planning to use the smartphone’s battery, which could create one more problem, instead of fixing one. We expect the smartphone’s battery to drain much faster with the Spectacles connect to it.

The Spectacles’ design includes earbuds too, so the user can listen to music and use them as headphones. Samsung’s wearable gadget is headed to workouts and sports in general, which makes them only an indirect competitor for Google Glass, because those aren’t designed to be worn all day long.

Like most of the other tech companies, Samsung seems to be all-in with the wearable computers market and keeps working on this kind of gadgets. Unfortunately, Gear was seen as a fail, because it doesn’t offer very much for the steep price tag it comes with.

While Samsung’s Spectacles look interesting, it’s not going to be headed to the usual customer, because they might not be as useful as Google Glass. We expect to see a lot of patents and even final products on the wearable tech market in the upcoming year and we hope that at least a few of them are going to be as interesting as Google’s Glass.

Until now Glass is the only one that managed to gain traction and become the most wanted gadget in the UK. Competitors are going to struggle to gain a piece of the market share and have no idea how the fight will turn out, considering that none of them is out on the market yet, but 2014 will definitely be an interesting year.