Qualcomm announces Snapdragon Wear 4100 platform for smartwatches

Today Qualcomm took the wraps off its next wearable chipset family, the Snapdragon Wear 4100 and 4100+. Based on the model numbers of the contained chips, these seem to be based off of the Snapdragon 429 mobile SoC.

The Snapdragon Wear 4100+ includes the main SoC, the Always-On (AON) co-processor for low power states, along with companion chips including PMIC, RF for modem/GPS and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, and RFFE. The Snapdragon Wear 4100 (sans "+") does not have the AON co-processor. Otherwise, the two are identical.

The Wear 4100+ is built on a 12nm process and has a 1.7 GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU, Adreno 504 GPU, support for 750 MHz LPDDR3 memory and eMMC 4.5 storage, as well as dual ISPs with support for up to 16 MP cameras. Yes, cameras, on wearables. We're not sure why, but maybe new products in the pipeline will surprise us.

The Wear 4100+ is designed to deliver 85% better performance than the Wear 3100, while the 4G LTE modem, also based on 12nm process technology, now has a dedicated DSP, low power features, and supports Cat.4 LTE and dual antennas.

There's a smarter AON co-processor, which enhances battery life and now can show up to 64K colors (compared to 16 in the Wear 3100). This can also handle continuous heart rate and sleep monitoring, step counting, alarms, timers, and haptics, and it also has faster tilt-to-wake responsiveness.

The Wear 4100 family has Wi-Fi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 5.0, which reduces power consumption by around 25%. This platform is intended for use with Google's Wear OS as well as the open source version of that. Qualcomm has unveiled that the Mobvoi TicWatch Pro 3 is coming soon powered by the new chip, as well as a new Suunto wearable, while imoo will launch the Z6 Ultra kids smartwatch using the Wear 4100 within the next 30 days.