The next Motorola Moto smartwatch will have a Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 4100 SoC, GPS and NFC

Qualcomm unveiled its Wear 4100 and Wear 4100+ platforms last year, but many smartwatch manufacturers remain wedded to its older Wear 3100 chipsets. The Wear 3100 platform is essentially a re-branded Wear 2100 though, which Qualcomm unveiled in early 2016. Hence, recent smartwatches like the Montblanc Summit Lite rely on a chipset that is five years old. In fact, only Mobvoi has adopted the Wear 4100 platform so far, albeit only with the TicWatch Pro 3 and the TicWatch Pro 3 LTE.

It turns out that the image below, the contrast and brightness of which we have adjusted slightly, contains the text Snapdragon Wear 4100, indicating the smartwatch's chipset. eBuyNow, the company that produces Motorola smartwatches under licence, has not submitted anything to bodies like the FCC, but the image reveals that the device will support NFC, GPS and 5 ATM of water resistance too. Additionally, the clear back shows a wireless charging coil, although this could be using the same charging technology as previous Moto smartwatches, not the Qi wireless standard.

We remain unsure if the smartwatch pictured above is the Moto G or the Moto One. However, both will arrive by July 2021. In our recent TicWatch Pro 3 LTE review, for example, we found that the Wear 4100 outperformed the Apple Watch Series 6 and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3, which would never have been possible with a Wear 3100-based smartwatch. Hopefully, more smartwatch manufacturers adopt the more powerful Wear 4100 platform this year, as it delivers significantly better performance than the Wear 3100/2500/2100 platform that preceded it.

Purchase the Moto 360 3rd Gen 2020 on Amazon