There have been requests for Qualcomm to announce a new chipset for smartwatches to replace 2016’s Snapdragon Wear 2100. On Tuesday, Qualcomm did announce a new Soc – the Snapdragon Wear 2500 – but with a caveat.
Qualcomm in its official press release revealed the new Snapdragon Wear 2500 is specifically made for kids’ smartwatches. The mobile platform like Qualcomm likes to refer to its chipsets was announced at the on-going Mobile World Congress Shanghai.
According to the San-Diego based chipset company, the Snapdragon Wear 2100 is already widely used in the kids’ smartwatch segment by more than 10 OEMs. In order to drive development in the segment, it announced the Snapdragon Wear 2500.
The Wear 2500 offers up to a 14% increase in battery life (standby and active modes) compared to older generation models. It also has a 38% smaller PMIC and a 5th gen 4G LTE modem. Qualcomm says the chipset has an optimized version of Android for kids’ watches that is based on Android Oreo. The version of Android reportedly fits into a 512MB memory (most definitely RAM in this case since Wear 2100 smartwatches have 768MB RAM).
The new watch platform also supports NXP’s next-gen NFC for secure payment so kids can use their watches for paying for things in school. Snapdragon Wear 2500 also supports gesture-based gaming and apps.
Qualcomm says Huawei is the lead customer it is partnering with on the new chipset. So expect the first smartwatch with the new chipset to come from the Chinese giant. It is also working with Invensense Inc. on sensor algorithms.
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Commercial samples of the Snapdragon Wear 2500 are already being shipped to customers. A system-on-module and development kit is expected to be available in Q3 2018.
