The smartwatch is the tech world’s newest darling – but we’re not sure whether it does anything useful and exciting that all our other gadgets don’t already manage.

Image: Div2005

The tech battle has taken a new turn with the emergence of the “smartwatch”, or the Samsung Galaxy Gear as the Korean tech company has chosen to name its most recent contribution to the world. As usual, when one tech giant reveals something new, another is never far behind, and Apple is said to be making roads into producing one of its own. Should it even bother, though? Is this hot new gadget something we’ll all be craving in 12 months’ time, or should it never have got off the starting blocks in the first place?

True, it is amazing and ground-breaking, but – if you’ll pardon the pun – it also seems like an expensive waste of time. The watch is already a classic piece of design that doesn’t need to be tampered with. It can be a statement, a piece of jewelry or, as for most people, a useful instrument with which you keep track of time. So why go and change an already great concept by stuffing it with texts, calls and apps?

The smartwatch does, however, offer several features that your normal time-keeper doesn’t. As well as letting you know the hour and minute, you can check your email, make phonecalls and play games on it. The Galaxy Gear also has voice control and a camera, and connects easily to your phone via Bluetooth, which allows you to sync all your photos and all your data to your watch. This could all be very useful – that is, if you don’t already have such things synced on your iPad, laptop or iPod, as well as floating around in some virtual cloud somewhere.

And now we come to the crux of the matter – all of the features that the Galaxy Gear offers may come in handy from time to time, but they are not things that we can’t already do on several other machines. So why buy another one, when all it does in the end is give you one more thing to charge in the evening? Besides, the Galaxy Gear will only be able to work alongside the Galaxy Note 3 smartphone at present – a move which, ironically enough, seems rather dumb.