The market of smartwatches is getting more competitive by the days. Now, there is a race among companies to see which one will be the first to deliver the best features, the most advanced hardware, and the most complete firmware. While Apple and Samsung take total control of its software and hardware, there are several companies relying on Google’s WearOS and Snapdragon Wear platform. Today is a great day for the Qualcomm-driven smartwatches as the chipmaker has just announced a new platform for wearable dubbed Snapdragon Wear 4100 family.
The new lineup of wearable SoCs is composed of the Snapdragon Wear 4100 and 4100+. According to GSMArena, these new smartwatch platforms seem to be based on the mobile Snapdragon 429 SoC. This is yet to be confirmed.
Snapdragon Wear 4100+ / 4100 specifications
The Snapdragon 4100+ includes the system-on-chip as well as the Always-On co-processor that will drive a low power state. It also has the usual set of chips including PMIC, RF for modem/GPS and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, and RFEE. The Snapdragon Wear 4100, in counterpart to the Plus model, does not include the Always-On co-processor. Apart from this hardware characteristic, they seem to be identical.
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As far as technical specifications are concerned, the Wear 4100+ is built on a 12nm process featuring a 1.7GHz Quad-Core Cortex-A53 CPU, Adreno 504 GPU, support for LPDDR3 memory and eMMC 4.5 storage, as well as dual ISPs with support for up to 16MP cameras. The latest bit is quite important since it will allow companies to implement cameras in smartwatches. This not seems to be practical right now, but the advent of in-display cameras can make them really convenient for some functions. Worth noting that this entire setup quite resembles what we’re used to seeing in low-end smartphones. Smartphones are much more demanding than smartwatches, thus making this platform quite overpowered for smartwatches.
Smartphone-level performance for smartwatches with 12nm power-efficiency
According to the company, the new Snapdragon Wear 4100+ will offer 85% better performance than the Wear 3100. It’s nearly 100% more, this is a huge bump! Moreover, the new platform has a 4G LTE modem, also based on 12nm process technology with a dedicated DSP, low power features, and support for Cat.4 LTE and dual antennas.
The Always-On co-processor can show up to 64K colors. For comparison, Wear 3100 can hold just 16K. The co-processor can handle continuous heart rate and sleep monitoring as well as step counting, alarms, timers, and other features. This is a super-efficient co-processor ensuring a long-usage for devices featuring the Wear 4100+ platform. Both platforms offer Wi-Fi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 25%. Both offer support to Google’s WearOS and its open-source variant.
According to Qualcomm, the first smartwatch to sport the Snapdragon 4100+ it will be the Mobvoi TicWatch 3 as well as a new Suunto Wearable. The Snapdragon 4100, in counterpart, should be seen through imoo Z6 Ultra kids smartwatch in the next 30 days.
