There’s movement in wearables today, with Qualcomm expected to announce a new Snapdragon Wear platform today. That release has been long awaited by many, with new power saving features expected – but the big question is when can we see them?
The answer, according to Qualcomm’s senior director of wearables Pankaj Kedia, it will be soon. In an interview with Wareable.com, Kedia said that consumers can ‘expect to see new smartwatches from partners, running the new tech, by the holidays’.
The new watches will have ‘special consideration to fashion and sports use cases’ says Kedia, who described the new platform as the first with purpose-built chips. The new platform will also have improved battery life – something that has been a big drawback with the now two-and-a-half year old platform.
Manufacturers such as Mobvoi and Casio have recently announced watches with a dual screen setup with a low-power LCD on top of an AMOLED panel to allow for up to a month of battery life using the low-power option. A new, more power-efficient platform would offer some even better options for manufacturers.
This mention of purpose-built chips jibes with previous information we’ve heard about the platform with the new Snapdragon Wear 3100 apparently set to use use a dedicated power management chips called the PMW3100 alongside a ‘BlackGhost’ low power processor used for functions not requiring the main quad-core processor.
We expect to see the announcement at some stage tonight, with the event taking place in San Diego, California. New details on the platform should be available fairly soon, and the announcement of watches will hopefully be soon after.
I’ll be disappointed in any watch that comes out without a dual screen setup even on the new chipset (which I’m waiting for). I definitely won’t be buying any watch with 512MB ram in it either, my current watch will last a lot longer if need be.