Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon Wear 4100 and 4100+ for Wear OS

Two years after launching the Snapdragon Wear 3100, Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon Wear 4100 series of chipsets for wearable devices. The new chipset series for Wear OS includes the Snapdragon Wear 4100 and 4100+ look to deliver a meaningful performance boost for smartwatches.

The company announced the present Wear 3100 which powers all current devices in September 2018. But the chip offered no significant upgrade over the Wear 2100 from 2016. It packed the same CPU with the major difference being another component that made possible power-efficient always-on displays.

The new Snapdragon Wear 4100 utilises a more efficient and smaller 12nm processor compared to 28nm used by its predecessor. Qualcomm says this makes for a “significantly faster new processor.” It also brings 25% improvement in the battery life and there is equally a faster LPDDR3 memory. The processor features quad-core A53 processors clocked at 1.7GHz for 85% faster performance and the graphics is powered by the Adreno 504 GPU which is 2.5x faster. There is support for up to 16-megapixel cameras while a lower-power 4G LTE modem is also onboard.

On its part, Snapdragon Wear 4100+ features an updated QCC1110 co-processor that can handle more tasks. This includes offloading sleep tracking and heart-rate tracking to this resource-efficient chip instead of the main CPU.

Other improvements include, “watch mode” which now supports up to 64,000 colours, battery indicators, alarms, reminders, and haptics, while Qualcomm touts “faster tilt-to-wake responsiveness.” The regular 4100 lacks the co-processor for manufacturers that don’t need an ambient display.

Apart from Wear OS, the Snapdragon Wear 4100 series supports Android Open Source Platform (AOSP).

Qualcomm says wearable devices running the Snapdragon Wear 4100 will be shipping soon. Watchmaker Mobvoi has hinted that it has a “next-generation TicWatch Pro” coming with the new chip later this year. Also, kid smartwatch brand imoo is planning to launch a device within the next month.

(via)

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