For almost two years now, we have not seen any new chipset from Qualcomm and since then, Android smartwatches have languished. But in the coming months, they could finally start seeing some meaningful improvements: Qualcomm is releasing a new processor for watches, called the Snapdragon Wear 3100, that’s meant to extend battery life, enhance always-on displays, and offer more versatility when it comes to sports devices and fitness sensors.
The new processor’s key feature is the addition of a secondary low-power processor, which is supposed to handle most of the work when a smartwatch isn’t in use. This co-processor will power a watch’s sensors and ambient display, doing so while using up to 20 times less energy than the main processor would, according to Qualcomm.
“The 95 percent of the time when you’re not actually interacting with [your watch], you are in ambient mode or always-sensing mode,” says Pankaj Kedia, Qualcomm’s wearables leader. “So the co-processor, that’s where you are 95 percent of the time … we are doing less and less things in the main [processor].”
For this chip generation, that’s about all that’s changing. Both the Wear 3100 and the Wear 2100, its predecessor, share the same main processor — so there’s no reason to expect major speed gains. The co-processor is the main improvement, and that means almost all of the enhancements enabled by Qualcomm’s new chip come from what the co-processor can do.
Battery life to last for days
Smartwatches with a Wear 3100 processor will gain one other handy trick: if their battery gets low, the major functions of the smartwatch can shut off, allowing the battery to last potentially for days longer while powering a simple watch face. Qualcomm says that from 20 percent battery, you’d get a week of additional use in this mode. The downside, though, is that Wear OS shuts down, so you don’t get features like notifications. But it’ll at least continue to tell the time.
Qualcomm says the first watches with a Wear 3100 chip will ship before the end of the year. Among the first out the door will be models from Fossil, Louis Vuitton, and Montblanc — Google, however, will be a no show this year, having said last week it isn’t planning to release the rumored Pixel Watch. That fashion brands will be the first adopters should come as no surprise. Over the past couple years, fashion brands have taken to smartwatches and churned out model after model of watch with differing designs and not much else in the way of improvements.
