With the arrival of the overhauled Snapdragon W5 Plus / W5 wearable platforms, Qualcomm seems to be ditching the Snapdragon Wear brand. The W5 Plus is primarily aimed at high-end smartwatches, while the W5 is for more basic devices — like kids’ watches, fitness trackers, or other enterprise devices.
(Photo from: Qualcomm official website)
Pankaj Kedia, Qualcomm’s global head of smart wearables, said the two chips are built for wearables, not repurposed smartphone chips.
In terms of specifications, the new platform continues the hybrid architecture found in the Snapdragon Wear 3100 / 4100 chips — including the main processor for interactive tasks and an always-on co-processor to help conserve power.
On the process side, the Snapdragon W5 Plus uses an advanced process that has been refined from 12nm to 4nm for the main chip, while the co-processor has been upgraded from 28nm to 22nm.
For reference, the Exynos W920 wearable chip used in the Samsung Galaxy Watch4 is only a 5nm process, and the Apple Watch Series 7 is only a 7nm process.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the W5 Plus necessarily has an all-around lead, but Qualcomm has finally gone “with the flow” and used an advanced process this time.
With the W5 Plus platform, the always-on co-processor can take on functions that used to be handled by the main SoC, such as keyword detection for voice assistants, low-power Bluetooth 5.3 notifications, health tracking such as sleep/heart rate monitoring, and more.
Pankaj Kedia noted that the coprocessor can also support on-board machine learning, but we’ll have to see how the company will utilize it.
Essentially, the main processor will only be used for various interactions such as calls, 3D dials/animations, and GPS navigation.
Qualcomm’s press release states that the Snapdragon W5 series offers 50 percent longer battery life, double the performance and 30 percent smaller size than the Snapdragon 4100 wearable platform.
In some cases, the W5 Plus platform can even last for days without frequent recharges — something that many current Wear OS smartwatches have yet to do.
During the briefing, Pankaj Kedia also shared internal battery life numbers. As an example, the always-on Bluetooth watch with a 300mAh battery is expected to add about 15 hours of battery life.
In addition, the higher performance/smaller chip size makes it easier for manufacturers to create lightweight and stylish watches. And for consumers with smaller wrists, there may be no need to obsess.
As manufacturers continue to add more advanced features, retail products tend to have larger batteries to compensate for the extra power consumption. As a result, smartwatch sizes have been increasing slowly but steadily for years prior (like the Galaxy Watch5 Pro).
As for the entry Snapdragon W5 platform, we don’t really have to wait long, as OPPO has already said it will launch its Watch 3 smartwatch in August.
Mobvoi will also be launching its next TicWatch with the W5 Plus chip this fall.
Finally, looking back at the Snapdragon Wear 3100 wearable chip announced in 2018, we won’t see a lot of devices using the platform until fall 2019.
The Snapdragon Wear 4100 platform, announced in the summer of 2020, is even more awkward, with only a handful of smartwatches adopting it a year after launch.
On the software side, Wear OS 3 doesn’t seem to be getting off to a great start either, and it’s unclear when it will arrive on smartwatches outside of Samsung.
The good news is that since last year, Samsung and Google have tried to solve the software problem by creating a unified software platform.
