Two years have passed since Qualcomm released a new smartwatch processor, and Android smartwatches have been slowed down to a huge extent as a result. However, that will be changing this year because Qualcomm is releasing two new smartwatch chips at the very least. The first one has already been announced, although it is just meant for kids’ watches.
The new chip, Snapdragon Wear 2500 is created for what Qualcomm sees as the emergence of a market that is built around smartwatches for the needs of kids and parents. The leader of wearable at Qualcomm, Pankaj Kedia, stated that the purpose of these watches is to give kids the opportunity to learn and connect with gadgets by the time they leave their homes and end up in school where they will no longer have access to the home computer.
In an interview, Kedia said, “It’s like you grew up on Alexa and you want to take Alexa with you. You want to ask Alexa ‘what’s the capital of the US’ or ‘who is the 35th president of the US?’ or learn a different language, and voice assistants are making it easy for you to do that. Literally, kids in that bracket are using kid watches to learn.”
Snapdragon Wear 2500 is one-third smaller than the previous Wear chips. It supports LTE, 5MPs camera, tracking of locations, and battery that lasts longer. It doesn’t support Wear OS – Google’s smartwatch platform, which is kind of interesting. Instead, it will be paired with a custom version of Android Qualcomm built for kids’ watches known as Android for kids. It also seems the Wear 2500 chip will not support notifications or app store, manufacturers will have to preload it with apps and games that assume kids and parents will fancy.
Wear 2500 sounds like it will have less performance capacity than the chip Qualcomm plans to release next, however, Kedia did not give any clarifications on that, or why Wear 2500 was not used for general-purpose smartwatches. He said, “I have a Tesla and a Porsche. Both take me from point A to point B, but they’re designed for different use cases. Same kind of thing here.”