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With smartphones now dominating cell phone sales worldwide, manufacturers are looking past tablets toward a better untapped device market. Judging by the success of the poorly-reviewed Samsung Galaxy Gear, the subsequent big market is shaping as much as be wearable devices.

Market research firm Strategy Analytics predicted that the worldwide wearable device market will hit 125 million units sold by the year 2017. The firm believes that smart watches, smart glasses, and fitness bands could be the biggest sellers in wearable computing over the subsequent five years. As well as the arriving wave of smart watches and the headwear segment which will begin with Google Glass, Strategy Analytics believes that both Apple and Microsoft would be “key vendors” within the years yet to come.

“Texas Instruments, Google, and Samsung have to be seen because the pioneering vendors for launching products at an early stage within the markets’ life-cycle, but key vendors among the many second wave of entrants will include Apple and Microsoft,” said Matt Wilkins, director of Tablets & Wearables at Strategy Analytics.

With the wearable computing market set to take off, developers are only as wanting to jump prior to the curve as manufacturers are. Strategy Analytics conducted a survey of app developers and located that over 27% of them expect to work on software for wearable computing products in the next year.

Though the identical survey found that over 90% of developers develop for smartphones, slightly fewer of them expect to take action next year. Apparently instead that developers are looking toward online game consoles, tablets, smart TVs, and cars as future platforms along with wearable devices.