Google's plans in the wearable space appear to be kicking into gear. Fresh from apparently making a bid to buy Fitbit, it looks like a new chipset for Wear OS smartwatches could be on the way.
Evidence of its existence come courtesy of source code uploaded to a code forum by Qualcomm that makes reference to a 'SDW3300 device'. That seems to point to the new chipset being called Snapdragon Wear 3300.
This would of course be the follow-up to the Snapdragon 3100, which is currently powering a wide range of Wear OS smartwatches. That includes pretty much all of Fossil's Gen 5 watches. It's fair to say though that we've not been falling over ourselves to praise the 3100.
We haven't really experienced that jump up in performance and improved battery efficiency we thought we'd see on watches powered by the processor tech.
There's hope, now, though. The 3300, according to those code references will be based on the existing Snapdragon 429 smartphone and tablet processor, which bodes well.
We first heard that Qualcomm was working on a new chipset for Wear smartwatches back in July this year.
That initial report also suggested the new platform would be a stripped back version of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 429 mobile platform. It also pointed to 64-bit computing support to offer a vastly improved experience overall.
That's not to say that this will translate directly to super smartwatch performance. But it's certainly a good indication that Google knows that Wear OS is still largely underperforming compared to what is on offer from its rivals.
The previous report suggested we should expect to see the new Wear chipset in smartwatches in 2020. That probably makes a whole lot of sense considering there's just a few months left of 2019 and it could be the perfect way to kick start Google's smartwatch plans next year.
Via: XDA Developers
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Reporter Max Freeman-Mills joined the Wareable team as a journalism graduate. He's gone on to be contributing editor at Pocketlint, as a skilled technology journalist and expert.
In addition, Max has written for The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, and has done work for Gizmodo UK and Kotaku UK.
Max has his finger is firmly on the pulse of wearable tech – ensuring our coverage is the most comprehensive it can be.
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