Qualcomm wants you to train your new Snapdragon

Qualcomm has expanded its wearable chip range the recent Computex Taipei event,announcing the mid-range Snapdragon Wear 1100, a chip for less powerful wearables.

The Snapdragon Wear 1100 is aimed at “targeted purpose wearables” like fitness and location trackers, and smartwatches for kids, which don’t require as much computing power as a fully fledged smartwatch.

Qualcomm has made the Snapdragon Wear 1100 15 percent smaller than the Wear 2100; Qualcomm’s more powerful wearable chip for smartwatches. This might allow fitness tracker manufacturers like Fitbit and Jawbone to create even smaller devices, without sacrificing too much on the performance side.

An LTE/3G modem, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low-energy, Qualcomm’s own iZat location tracking technology, and a Power Save Mode are all inside the chip. The chipmaker claims it can last for up to seven days on LTE standby.

Qualcomm want a piece of purpose-built wearables

We are starting to see a shift in the wearable market towards “purpose-built wearables”; devices that are useful for a specific market or type of customer. Xmetrics CEO Andrea Rinaldo spoke about this in a recent interview, stating that users interactions should be limited but powerful, like the company’s swimming headband, rather than trying to capture every market at once.

Qualcomm is eager to tap into that market of enthusiastic niche markets, as they have beenwith autonomous cars, virtual reality, and any other emerging technology that requires a chipset.1

At the Computex event, Qualcomm revealed that over 100 wearables use the company’s chips. Sadly, for Qualcomm, most of the wearables use the Snapdragon 400, a low-end mobile chip, rather than the Snapdragon Wear 2100.

It also revealed that the Snapdragon Wear 1100 would be available for manufacturers by the end of the year. As with most Qualcomm chip announcements, a price for the chip was not disclosed.