After two and a half years of having the same old Snapdragon Wear 2100 on all Wear OS smartwatches, Qualcomm has finally unveiled the Snapdragon Wear 3100. This time, it focuses more on power efficiency rather than performance.
A new architecture
The Snapdragon Wear 3100 comes with a new wearable architecture that it’s calling “Big-Small-Tiny.” The “Big” is a quad-core ARM Cortex A7 processor. The “Small” is a digital signal processor. And the “Tiny” is an “Ultra-Low Power Co-Processor.”
The “tiny” co-processor
The “tiny” co-processor is used when the watch is in ambient mode, leaving the more power-intensive A7 cores to sleep. It also enhances ambient mode by supporting a seconds hand, up to 16 colors, and improved brightness. Even with these enhancements, it’ll be able to use 20x less power than the standard chipset.
Personalized experiences
Qualcomm, along with Google, also announced two other Wear OS personalized experiences. There’s “Dedicated Sports Experiences” and “Traditional Watch Mode.”
“Dedicated Sports Experiences” is for users who want GPS and heart rate sensors to work for longer workout sessions. It promises to provide up to 15 hours of battery life on a smartwatch with a 450 mAh battery. Then there’s “Traditional Watch Mode” which promises up to 30 days of use at full power with a 340 mAh battery.
The first smartwatches with the new chip
Louis Vuitton, Fossil, and Montblanc will be one of the first ones to use the new processor in their smartwatches. Unfortunately, Google will not be releasing a smartwatch this year.
Source: Qualcomm
