14 DAY TRIAL // While Apple is currently the king of wearables, with the Apple Watch by far the best-selling smartwatch on the market, there’s a chance the Cupertino-based tech giant would rather sooner than later have to face much fiercer competition coming from the Android front.
This is because Google has been working hard on improving Wear OS, and with Samsung joining the push, it’s very clear the long-term goal is to make Wear OS 3 a worthy alternative to Apple’s watchOS.
Another company joining these efforts appears to be Qualcomm, as the company is in charge of powering the Wear OS devices that would hit the market running the next version of the Google operating system.
Hello, Snapdragon Wear 5100!
XDA has come across references of a new so-called SW5100 platform, which is obviously believed to be the new Snapdragon Wear 5100 chip supposed to spearhead the Wear OS 3 push.
Codenamed Monaco, the new chip could use a quad-core design with ARM Cortex-A73 cores, though this isn’t necessarily good news for those hoping for a massive performance increase.
Most likely, this chip would be focused on a more balanced performance/battery consumption ratio rather than on increasing the performance substantially, so in theory, it shouldn’t necessarily be a major overhaul as compared to Snapdragon Wear 4100.
As for when the chip is expected to see the daylight, this is something that’s completely in the rumor stage for the time being, though more information in this regard could be shared by Qualcomm itself in the fall.
This means the first devices powered by the new Snapdragon Wear 5100 could hit the shelves in early 2022, so you’d better not hold your breath to see what the new chip upgrade is all about for the time being.