Why the Samsung Galaxy Gear is a blast from the past

Here's what's wrong with the Samsung Galaxy Gear.

It's a horse.

It's a good horse, I'm sure.

But it's still a horse.

I should probably explain.

The Galaxy Gear is a wrist-mounted phone that Samsung hopes will be a fashion icon. It has a touch screen, Bluetooth, email, texting and apps.

So did the Samsung S9110, which came out in 2009.

The Gear is better in almost every respect, but the underlying philosophy is identical.

Henry Ford famously said that he didn't ask people what they wanted, because they would have asked for faster horses.

The Galaxy Gear is a faster horse.

Where's the wow?

The S9110 was a fine piece of engineering, but it wasn't a paradigm-shifting, world-changing, envelope-pushing, category-defining sensation, which is why you almost certainly aren't wearing one on your wrist right now. Neither is the Gear, which does much the same but with slightly better tech.

Where's the wow?

There's nothing wrong with the Galaxy Gear. It's a decent and decently priced smartphone/tablet accessory. But where's the killer app?

Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the tech press is so desperate for a Next Big Thing story that it's blown the smartwatch idea out of all proportion, putting a Saviour Of The World label on something that's going to be as important to our lives as iPod Socks.

Or maybe it's that Samsung, for all its talents, just doesn't have the vision thing. And neither does Sony, or Pebble, or Google, or LG, or anybody else working on a smartwatch project.

Does Apple?

It's easy to assume Apple has some kind of magical powers, but over the years it has excelled at one particular thing: spotting what everybody else is doing wrong, and finding a way to do it right. Music players existed before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone, tablets before the iPad. Maybe it's going to do the same with the smartwatch.

What's frustrating for me is that I can't see how. I can see what's wrong with the Galaxy Gear, but I can't see how to do it right: I can't work out the smartwatch killer app, the must-have feature, the thing that'll make me spend money I can't afford on a product I can't need.

Can you?