Next-gen Snapdragon Wear SoC now rumored to be based on budget smartphone silicon

Smartwatches that run Google's Wear OS have been found to be falling behind, particularly compared to their Apple counterparts. This may be due to their relatively poor battery life, responsiveness and limited panel of functions. Qualcomm may have addressed this with its latest SoC for wearables, the Snapdragon Wear 3100.

This platform has been custom-designed with the needs of smartwatches in mind. They include a specific sub-chipset module that controls power consumption. Nevertheless, this new CPU is found in few new smartwatches at present, which limits its ability to affect the market in any tangible way.

Should some new leaks published by WinFuture prove accurate, its immediate successor may have a better shot at the same. It is rumored to be called the Snapdragon Wear 2700, and may be based on an SoC found in some existing budget devices, including some newer Nokia phones and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.0 (2019). 

This CPU runs at a maximum of 2.0 GHz and is of a 12-nanometer (nm) architecture. This may not sound like much, but the Snapdragon 429 could also bring 64-bit support, Bluetooth 5.0 and support for eMMC 5.1 flash memory to wearables. This could in fact improve on the 28nm, Bluetooth 4.2 Wear 3100 by a good margin.