Samsung’s new Gear 360 is smaller, does 4K and supports iPhone

The Samsung Gear 360 has made 360-degree content creation more accessible for the masses. It was compact, easy to use and was reasonably priced for its offering.

Along with the Galaxy S8, Samsung has announced an updated version and it expands VR content sharing to the next level.

Instead of a golf ball design, the new Gear 360 looks like a keyhole-shaped stick with 2 fisheye lenses on top. Both side uses an 8.4MP image sensor with f/2.2 aperture and it is now capable of shooting immersive content in 4K resolution. That’s 4096×2048 videos at 24fps or still photos at 15MP.

On top of that, you can now share your 360-degree environment in real-time. When it’s connected to a smartphone or a computer, you can broadcast live directly to Facebook, YouTube and Samsung VR.

Powering the Gear 360 is a smaller 1,160mAh non-removable battery and it supports microSD storage up to 256GB. For charging, it now uses USB Type-C instead of microUSB. Like its previous version, it is also slightly water resistant with an IP53 rating.

Another new highlight is the support for more devices. The new Gear 360 will finally support iPhones running on iOS 10. This includes the iPhone SE right up to the latest iPhone 7. It will also work with Windows and Mac computers as well. Connectivity wise, it supports Bluetooth 4.1 and WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4GHz/5GHz).

At the moment there are no details on its pricing and availability. We’ll update this post as soon as we get more information. As a reference, the current Gear 360 is officially priced at RM1,299 in Malaysia.