Samsung publicly announced Tuesday its intention to develop a smart watch to compete with a similar speculated upcoming Apple product, according to Bloomberg. Samsung emphasized that it wants to be first out of the gate with the product and is pitting itself in a race against Apple to win consumer attention.

"We've been preparing the watch product for so long," Executive VP of Samsung Mobile Lee Young Hee told Bloomberg. "The issue here is who will first commercialize it so consumers can use it meaningfully."

A few screenshots from an Samsung smart watch named the Galaxy Altius leaked in February. The screenshots showed a 500×500 screen running an OS named "AltiusOS beta2," so it's not explicitly clear whether the watch would run Android or not. The watch appeared to include 235MB of internal storage space and was able to handle music, e-mail, and mapping apps.

By contrast, Apple's iWatch, which may be made of curved glass, will reportedly run a full version of iOS and will launch later this year. Apple has chosen not to scale up the iPod nano's OS, but it has apparently run into some problems getting the watch's battery to last beyond a couple of days. Ideally, it would only need to recharge every four or five days.

Samsung's determination to beat Apple to market echoes the race Samsung and Android initially lost to Apple for a market-dominating touchscreen smartphone. The notion of the smart watch also seems like a sidelong answer to Google Glass as a way to minimize the interference of a smartphone's alerts and interactions to a smaller, less intrusive accessory.