Samsung is working on a smartwatch that can make calls and manage sending and receiving texts without being tethered to a smartphone, the Wall Street Journal reports. It can also send email, and packs GPS, Bluetooth and a heart monitor, according to the paper. Basically, it’ll be a Gear 2 or equivalent that can work without a smartphone feeding it cell phone functions, and it’ll run Tizen, just like Samsung’s current crop of wearables.

This supposed Dick Tracy watch will be unveiled in the next few months, according to the report, as soon as June or July. It’ll ship with a SIM card, and probably won’t sell very well. This isn’t the first time someone has deigned to put a phone on someone’s wrist; in fact, Samsung itself announced and then cancelled a watch phone back in 2003 that had an OLED screen and a whopping one and a half hours of talk time from a 400 mAh battery.

Smart features might make a watch phone a more attractive proposition that’s less likely to be vaporware before it can ever come to market, but I’ll still eat my Pebble if a Samsung Tizen smartphone watch becomes a top-selling device. What will be interesting to see is what entices users less – the current Gear line or something with standalone capabilities, which will undoubtedly up the total cost to consumer (but could conceivably remove the need for even owning a smartphone, for a special breed of crazy person).

Samsung is no stranger to trying things that aren’t necessarily going to be box office hits; it’s reportedly working on both a Google Glass competitor and an Oculus Rift-type VR headset, neither of which have yet demonstrated any kind of real mass market appeal. It’s clearly betting that there’s more value in moving early in markets that could become interesting to consumers a few years down the road than there is in taking a wait-and-see approach, and that’s at least good for industry watchers hoping for some fireworks.