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More and more consumers are beginning to accept wearable devices, and we have also seen the prominent issues within this market.
According to IDC’s 2019 Global Wearable Device Report,the shipment of wearable devices reached 336.5 million units, an 89% increase compared to the previous year.The popularity of true wireless earbuds accounted for a large portion of this growth, but smart bands and smartwatches also saw significant increases, with nearly 20 million additional units sold for each category.
The rapid growth of true wireless earbuds is built on multiple factors, including flagship products like AirPods Pro that popularized improvements in noise cancellation, battery life, and pairing experience, along with a substantial number of entry-level products meeting consumers’ basic needs for wireless audio. Almost all major smartphone manufacturers have joined this frenzy, boosting the sales of true wireless earbuds alongside competitive pricing.
The awkwardness of smart bands/watches is highlighted by the fact thatApple has launched six generations of smartwatches but still hasn’t found a balance in price, functionality, and overall experience, especially since consumers have not widely accepted watches that require daily charging. Meanwhile, lower-priced products with longer battery life often compromise significantly on functionality and smoothness, making them somewhat unappealing.
Smartwatches need products that can clear these obstacles to truly open up the market: they require a screen large enough to display more information while being wearable on the wrist, capable of performing tasks without needing to wake up the phone; they need sufficient battery life that doesn’t conflict with the charging frequency of smartphones; and they must offer powerful and rich functionalities with high smoothness to meet modern device standards.
Communication between smartphones, smart homes, and wearable devices is evolving towards more efficient and intelligent application scenarios. Therefore, future smartwatches not only need to address the aforementioned issues but will also inevitably extend towards tighter integration with external devices like smartphones,but unfortunately, these are goals that current hardware and software capabilities cannot yet achieve.
Most smartwatches outside of Apple and Samsung use two solutions: Qualcomm chips with WearOS/Android systems, which are smooth and have potential for functional expansion, but urgently need improvements in battery life. Embedded systems with low-power platforms can extend battery life to two weeks or more, but their limited functionality cannot meet more extensive usage needs.
In summary,having high performance, low power consumption, and multi-application capabilities will be essential conditions for smartwatches to meet development trends. In recent years, some manufacturers have chosen to “patch” existing hardware for upgrades, while others have adopted dual-platform high-low configurations to achieve performance and battery life, but none have fundamentally solved the problem.
After many years, Qualcomm finally introduced a new generation of smartwatch platforms in the summer of 2020, the Snapdragon Wear 4100 Plus and Snapdragon Wear 4100.We have waited far too long for hardware capable of fulfilling the comprehensive demands and development potential of smartwatches.
The Snapdragon Wear 4100 Finally “Turns the Tide”
The Snapdragon Wear 4100 series consists of two products: Wear 4100+ and Wear 4100,with a CPU featuring a 1.7GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 architecture and a GPU with Adreno A504, supporting up to 750MHz DDR3 memory. Additionally, it includes dual DSPs for processing communication and positioning, audio, and sensors, as well as dual ISPs supporting up to 16-megapixel photography.
Compared to the previous generation Wear 3100 platform widely used in current smartwatches, the Wear 4100 series represents a comprehensive upgrade at the architectural level. The Wear 3100, used in products like the Xiaomi Watch and Suunto 7, consists of a 1.1GHz quad-core Cortex-A7, Adreno A304, a single DSP, and a single ISP, and only supports 400MHz DDR3 memory.
Upgrading from a 28nm process to a 12nm process is also a significant advancement for the Wear 4100 series. By fitting more transistors into the same unit area, it brings improvements in performance and battery life. According to Qualcomm’s official data,CPU performance is improved by 85%, GPU performance by 250%, and battery life in full mode can be extended by 25%, with charging intervals expected to reach two days or more.
In addition to advancements in architecture and process, the enhanced QCC1110 co-processor, which retains its name but has improved capabilities, is worth mentioning.It uses a Cortex-M0 architecture and serves as a small core for running low-power modes, in contrast to the large core that runs the full system. It is only available on the Wear 4100+, but its always-on (AON) feature may make it the mainstay of this series.
The enhanced QCC1110’s color display capability has increased from 16 bits in the previous generation to 64,000 bits, and it supports functions such as step counting, clock, vibration, heart rate, and sleep monitoring. This means thatswitching to the AON-based long battery life mode allows the watch to provide an experience close to that of embedded system products, with much less compromise compared to a full smartwatch system, making it more practical.
In simple terms,the Wear 4100 series completes Qualcomm’s unification of the naming for its smartwatch platforms, with Wear 4100+ and Wear 4100 corresponding to the previous Wear 3100 and Wear 2500. The two products target integrated co-processor products, such as the Xiaomi Watch, and those where manufacturers pair their own co-processors, like the OPPO Watch using Apollo 3.
Next, we can look forward to manufacturers launching corresponding products. Since both performance and battery life have seen significant improvements, the previously limited functionality of smartwatches has the opportunity to progress in tandem. Qualcomm has stated that the Wear 4100 series has already been shipped to smartwatch manufacturers before its official announcement, and specific products are not far off.
In fact, companies like Xiaotiancai and Mobvoi have already expressed their intention tolaunch new products featuring the new platform, such as the Xiaotiancai Phone Watch Z6 Peak Edition and TicWatch Pro.Xiaotiancai even provided a clear timeline, stating that it will officially launch within 30 days, and its overseas sub-brand imoo will also launch child watch products based on Wear 4100 simultaneously in China.
Is the Savior of Smartwatches Here?
On one side, there is a large core with significant improvements in energy consumption, and on the other, a small core that achieves long battery life and has more peripheral capabilities. We seem to see progress in smartwatches within the WearOS/Android camp. Just as we hoped, they will possess high performance, low power consumption, and multi-application capabilities, leading to a better smartwatch experience.
Even though the Apple Watch has yet to completely escape the fate of needing daily charging, its other “planks” are long enough: a smooth and comfortable watchOS interface, an app ecosystem rich enough to rival smartphones, and health capabilities ranging from ECG detection, exercise tracking, to fall detection and menstrual management, all focused on health.
By making its strengths long enough, Apple has captured the corresponding audience, thus the largest shipment of smartwatches still belongs to the Apple Watch, which accounted for over 30% of the market in 2019. Unfortunately,the WearOS/Android system on smartwatches has not replicated the glory of its mobile version, let alone match Apple in functionality or significantly surpass its market share.
This disadvantage stems from the previously mentioned lack of experience. The inability to achieve both high performance and long battery life is one issue, but aside from eSIM communication and exercise detection, the WearOS/Android camp has not reached Apple’s level in forming close connections with smartphones and other ecosystem devices, providing refined interactions and high-precision health management.
Therefore, we should have high expectations for the Wear 4100 series,as it is not just a simple upgrade of Qualcomm’s wearable device platform, but the closest redemption for smartwatch products.Perhaps in the second half of this year, we will see a large number of new models with significantly improved hardware performance and overall battery life, pushing the entire smartwatch category forward.
Of course, the Wear 4100 series is not flawless; the latest Cortex-A55 architecture and 7nm process have not been applied, and memory and storage support are not the latest LPDDR5 and UFS 3.1. This may be Qualcomm’s consideration of production costs and shipment scale, but undoubtedly, there is still considerable room for improvement in the smartwatch platform.
This article was edited by:Bai ZhengmingUnauthorized reproduction in any form is prohibited.
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