Samsung is heavily invested in its lineup of smartwatches. While smartwatches from many other smartphone OEMs use Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear platform and Google's Wear OS, Samsung uses its in-house Exynos SoCs and Tizen OS designed for wearables. These decisions have made Samsung's smartwatches competitive with Apple's offerings, and now Samsung has its sights set on the release of its next smartwatch. We've been expecting a successor to the first-generation Galaxy Watch for a while now, but a new certification filing suggests it might be branded as the "Galaxy Watch 3" rather than the Galaxy Watch 2 that we've been expecting it to be called.

Samsung's upcoming smartwatch has already been certified by a handful of regulatory agencies, including the U.S. FCC, the Korean NRRA, and the Thai NBTC, so a launch should happen soon. The latter certification filing is the most interesting one as it reveals the device may be named the Galaxy Watch 3. The device with this marketing name has the model name SM-R855F and is listed in a 41mm size, but there could be other sizes. (Other rumors hint at a 45mm size.) It's also listed with cellular connectivity (WCDMA/LTE) which is unsurprising as the original Galaxy Watch also came in an LTE model.

Samsung support pages have also gone live in Korea for model names SM-R840 and the SM-R850 (via MySmartPrice), so it's safe to assume these are models of the Galaxy Watch 3 as well.

As for why Samsung might skip the Galaxy Watch 2 branding, it's possibly a marketing decision because of the Galaxy Watch Active 2 that was released last year. With the Galaxy Watch 3 possibly being the better, more advanced watch, it's possible that Samsung doesn't want the public to perceive it as an inferior product to the Watch Active 2. Samsung is no stranger to skipping numbers sometimes for the sake of marketing: The ill-fated Galaxy Note 7 was actually a successor to the Galaxy Note 5 and the Galaxy S20 succeeded the Galaxy S10.

The next Galaxy Watch, whatever it's called, should be releasing very soon, possibly during the upcoming Samsung Unpacked event during which the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 series is also expected to be announced. Earlier leaks of the upcoming Galaxy Watch smartwatch suggest it'll retain the physical rotating bezel from the first model, have a stainless steel case, Gorilla Glass DX display, 5ATM water resistance, MIL-STD-810G rating for durability, GPS support, and possibly ECG and blood pressure monitoring.