A new Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear chip could be on the horizon, folks. Whether it’s the Snapdragon Wire 5100 or something else, Qualcomm has started teasing a piece of “big” news this week, with all the reckless references to the watch and watch you can ask for.
The world of Wear OS watches has survived on Qualcomm chips for years, even if a few chips are not good enough to make durable, quality smartwatches. For companies looking to build a smartwatch running on Google’s wearable platform, Qualcomm had the only chip available to make it happen.
As recently as 2020, Qualcomm finally seemed to make a decent chip on the Snapdragon Wire 4100/4100 +, but some watchmakers picked up the chip. There’s a good chance that many have avoided it because its release time couldn’t have been worse, with its availability landing as well as Wear OS uncertainty and then Google creating a new version of the platform with Samsung and not allowing any of their partners. In its first year, we got exactly 1 watch running 4100. Since that first year, we’ve only added a few new options.
But now that the availability of Wear OS 3 is opening up for more players who are apparently not known as Samsung, Qualcomm tells us that “the watch is ticking at something big.” In a teaser tweet below, they also show off an exploding smartwatch with a wearable chip inside and suggest that we all “wear what is important.”
The clock is ticking on something big. 3 pic.twitter.com/0bYaGf3SrF
– Snapdragon (Snapdragon) July 12, 2022
This time, let’s assume it’s a Snapdragon Wear 5100 or something similar, the timing is quite perfect. Google is really opening up support for Wear OS 3 in the rest of the world, and there is another great opportunity for smartwatches on Android. Who knows what we pixel clocks, new fossil clocks and more in the near future. Because Qualcomm is still the only chipmaker, let’s hope this chip is what we dreamed of.