Back in May, Qualcomm told us it will be upgrading its aging Snapdragon Wear 2100 chipset this year. It looks like we now have a date for the big reveal: 10 September.
Qualcomm has sent out invites to members of the press with a picture of a smartwatch and, in case that wasn’t enough of a giveaway, a tag line that says “set your watches”. Can you tell what it is yet?
Read this: Best smartwatches 2018
The only other thing we know is that the event will take place in San Francisco. We have no idea if this will literally just be a chipset reveal, or if we’ll see some new smartwatches to help launch the new platform. If we do, expect them to be running Wear OS.
When we spoke to Pankaj Kedia, Qualcomm's senior director of wearables, earlier in the year, he told us that the new chipset will be a complete refresh, with better battery life and improved support for fitness. As we also expect a process size smaller than 28nm, this should (hopefully) allow for smaller watches.
The 2100 arrived on outdated technology, a modified version of the Snapdragon 400 found on the earlier smartwatches, so this update has been a long time coming.
"Over the last two years we've been working with many of our customers and looked at what consumers like and don't like about products in the market," said Kedia at the time. "After we launched 2100 we rethought the system architecture together."
Kedia also told us that we can expect to see several smartwatches running the new chipset on the market by the holiday season.
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By Hugh Langley
Now at Business Insider, Hugh originally joined Wareable from TechRadar where he’d been writing news, features, reviews and just about everything else you can think of for three years.
Hugh is now a correspondent at Business Insider.
Prior to Wareable, Hugh freelanced while studying, writing about bad indie bands and slightly better movies. He found his way into tech journalism at the beginning of the wearables boom, when everyone was talking about Google Glass and the Oculus Rift was merely a Kickstarter campaign - and has been fascinated ever since.
He’s particularly interested in VR and any fitness tech that will help him (eventually) get back into shape. Hugh has also written for T3, Wired, Total Film, Little White Lies and China Daily.