The era of wearable electronics will dawn this fall now that Samsung is set to unveil its Galaxy Gear smartwatch early next month, just days before Apple’s iWatch is set to go on sale.

Samsung will unveil Galaxy Gear in Berlin on September 4, the day it’s also scheduled to debut its 5.7-inch-screen Galaxy Note 3 phablet smartphone. That’s less than a week before Apple’s September 10 launch of its long-anticipated iWatch.

Just as Apple has filed patent applications for the iWatch in the US, Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan, Samsung has filed applications for its Gear in the US and S. Korea. But the applications are short on detail, and the company is insisting that it has yet to finalize details of the smartwatch other than that it will be a phone that can browse the internet and will be made of metal, glass and synthetic fiber.

This won’t be the Korean electronic giant’s first crack at a watch phone. A version it released in 1999 failed to attract much interest. But that was long before technology had enabled miniaturization of the kinds of power- and processor-hungry capabilities found on today’s smartphones.

The other wearable smartphone that’s even more eagerly awaited is Google’s Glass. Several hundred copies of a developer version of the product were sold at $1,500 apiece earlier this year. The consumer version is expected to go on sale around the end of the year.