It's been around two months since Samsung announced the Gear S3, the third generation of its premium Tizen-powered wearable, at the IFA trade show in Berlin. Things have been surprisingly quiet since then, and certainly not so breathless as previous Samsung wearable launches... perhaps reflecting the cooling of the market towards smartwatches in general. Anyway, you'll soon be able to pre-order a new Samsung watch, and wait then wait a couple of weeks for it to arrive: pre-orders begin on Sunday, November 6th, with orders shipping out on the 18th.

The various models coming will "start at $349.99," according to the press release issued this morning. The new watch will come in "Frontier" and "Classic" versions, one with a sort of Timex look with designated numbers and divisions on the rotating bezel (above), one with a much cleaner bezel and more defined physical buttons. Both models use Gorilla Glass SR+ on the 1.3" screen, with the same 360x360 resolution of the previous model. It's a bit larger than the S2 at 12.9mm thick (using 22mm bands), and a much more expansive 380mAh battery. RAM gets boosted to 768MB, and the new models have both GPS and Samsung Pay compatibility.

An LTE version of the watch, available only in the Frontier trim, will be released for AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, presumably much more expensive than the standard Wi-Fi version available at Amazon, Macy's, Best Buy, and Samsung's online store. Like the previous model, the Gear S3 will be compatible with any Android device (including non-Samsung models) with 1.5GB of RAM and Android 5.0 or later. iOS compatibility is planned as well.

UPDATE: 2016/11/03 12:00pm PDT BY

AT&T will start taking pre-orders for its LTE variant of the Gear S3 Frontier tomorrow, November 4th. You can get one for just $49.99 if you also buy a new Galaxy phone on a two-year plan, which isn't bad if you were going to get one anyway. If you'd rather buy it outright, it'll be $17.50 a month for 20 months, or $350 total... the same price as the Wi-Fi version. So yes, my prediction above was dead wrong. Not bad.

PRESS RELEASE