Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100 Promises To Deliver Impressive Battery Life To Smartwatches

Qualcomm has officially announced the Snapdragon Wear 3100, the company’s latest chipset designed for wearable devices. The new Snapdragon Wear 3100 promises to deliver improved battery life and will support features that will come to Wear OS smartwatches.

The Snapdragon Wear 3100 was built from the ground up and isn’t simply a repurposed version of Qualcomm’s smartphone chipsets. The Wear 3100 comes with a quad-core processor that’s accompanied by the QC1110 co-processor. The inclusion of the QC1110 co-processor makes it possible to reduce power consumption while the smartwatch is on standby, according to 9To5Google.

Qualcomm said that the Snapdragon Wear 3100 reduces power consumption by 20 times over compared to other products. In terms of real life use, battery life of smartwatches equipped with this chipset should last between 36 and 60 hours, according to Digital Trends. However, battery life of smartwatches will still depend on the battery capacity that they’re packing.

“The new platform is designed to help reduce power usage in areas such as low power modes, GPS/location batching, per minute/second clock updates, sensors processing, MP3 playback, and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth voice queries. This results in typical battery life day of use improvements ranging from 4 to 12 hours compared to the previous Snapdragon Wear 2100 platform, depending on display type, battery capacity, and device configurations,” Qualcomm stated in a press release.

Additionally, Qualcomm teased an upcoming feature that can further extend battery life on watches powered by the Snapdragon Wear 3100. Called “Traditional Watch Mode,” the new feature will make it possible for smartwatches to have a week-long battery life. The feature turns off most of Wear OS’ features and provides users with a simple watch face with additional basic information. Qualcomm claims that Traditional Watch Mode could also extend battery life up to 30 days on a single full charge, but that would only work if the feature is turned on all the time.

Since the Snapdragon Wear 3100 will be primarily for Wear OS smartwatches, the chipset will be supporting a variety of new features for Google’s operating system. This includes the new Enhanced Ambient Mode, which will be able to show colors (up to 16 colors) on the screen, support adaptive brightness and show live complications.

The Snapdragon Wear 3100 will also have support for Dedicated Sports Experiences on Wear OS, which will allow watches to keep GPS and heart rate monitoring turned on for the duration of activities. Qualcomm said that this feature is designed to deliver up to 15 hours of battery life.

Fossil Group, Louis Vuitton and Montblanc are going to be the very first companies that will release smartwatches powered by the Snapdragon Wear 3100. Unfortunately, Qualcomm didn’t provide any information on when these smartwatches will be released, but it did say that the Snapdragon Wear 3100 is already in mass production and has already begun shipping to its partners.