Qualcomm has upgraded its smartwatch chip to focus on improving battery life.
Snapdragon Wear 3100, unveiled Monday, is designed to boost battery life by four to 12 hours over the Wear 2100 platform, which it announced in 2016.
The new 3100 chip takes some of the same architecture from the 2100
The new microprocessor will enable a watch to last longer in ambient mode or when the device simply displays a watch face, said Qualcomm senior director Pankaj Kedia.
People generally interact with their smartwatches 5 percent of the time during the day, so "95 percent of the time all you need is low power, always on," he said. "We are essentially mirroring how we use the watch on the (computing) architecture."
According to the company's own tests, the new chip can deliver a week's worth of battery life to a smartwatch running a traditional watch-facing mode, possibly up to 30 days. When the smartwatch activates the activity-tracking mode, the chip can deliver up to 15 hours of battery life. However, the new Wear 3100 chip still uses the quad-core A7 processor from the older 2100 platform, so don't expect a major CPU performance increase.
Qualcomm's chip has also been developed to support three different watch modes. They include a barebones traditional clock face, a display that'll show you a little more information such as your device's battery life and how many steps you've taken, and a third dedicated sports mode that'll display the time, in addition to calories burned and miles run.
The first watch vendors to use Wear 3100 chip include Fossil Group, Louis Vuitton, and Montblanc; the Montblanc product, the Summit 2, will launch next month. Google is also backing Qualcomm's new product through its Wear OS, formerly known as Android Wear.
Kedia told journalists he expects traditional
Qualcomm's attempts to stretch out a smartwatch's battery life do come with some limitations. For instance, the barebones traditional clock-facing mode can promise to extend the device's battery life up to 30 days. But to do this, it essentially turns your device into a
To prolong your watch's battery life, the mode will only turn on the device's display on when you flick your wrist or press the crown button on the side. To get out of the barebones clock-facing mode, you'll have to reboot the watch.
It'll be up to watch vendors on how they wish to implement the battery-saving features, Qualcomm said. A vendor might choose to let the owner only activate it when the watch's battery reaches 20 percent or lower. Or it'll be made accessible through the watch's setting function.
The new Wear 3100 chip also supports 4G and wireless charging. In addition, Qualcomm is designing the upcoming silicon to support next-generation NFC technology.
Editor's note: This story has been updated with more information on Qualcomm's new chip.