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Android Wear Is Getting Killed, and It's All Qualcomm's Fault (arstechnica.com)
The death of Android Wear is all Qualcomm's fault, largely due to the fact that the company "has a monopoly on smartwatch chips and doesn't seem interested in making any smartwatch chips," writes Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo. This weekend marks the second birthday of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC, which was announced in February 2016 and is the "least awful smartwatch SoC you can use in an Android Wear device." Since Qualcomm skipped out on an upgrade last year, and it doesn't seem like we'll get a new smartwatch chip any time soon, the entire Android Wear market will continue to suffer. From the report: In a healthy SoC market, this would be fine. Qualcomm would ignore the smartwatch SoC market, make very little money, and all the Android Wear OEMs would buy their SoCs from a chip vendor that was addressing smartwatch demand with a quality chip. The problem is, the SoC market isn't healthy at all. Qualcomm has a monopoly on smartwatch chips and doesn't seem interested in making any smartwatch chips. For companies like Google, LG, Huawei, Motorola, and Asus, it is absolutely crippling. There are literally zero other options in a reasonable price range (although we'd like to give a shoutout to the $1,600 Intel Atom-equipped Tag Heuer Connected Modular 45), so companies either keep shipping two-year-old Qualcomm chips or stop building smartwatches. Android Wear is not a perfect smartwatch operating system, but the primary problem with Android Wear watches is the hardware, like size, design (which is closely related to size), speed, and battery life. All of these are primarily influenced by the SoC, and there hasn't been a new option for OEMs since 2016. There are only so many ways you can wrap a screen, battery, and body around an SoC, so Android smartwatch hardware has totally stagnated. To make matters worse, the Wear 2100 wasn't even a good chip when it was new.
The reason Qualcomm doesn't give a flying fuck about smart watches is because no one is buying them.
If google etc wanted one so badly they could order custom designs, or make their own.
They is no money in that market.
Apple made $1.6B in the last quarter on their watches. The segment "Apple wearables" is equivalent to a Fortune-500 company in its own right
From: https://qz.com/973920/apple-aa...
There was a steady increase in the unit’s sales in the first year the Watch was on sale, rising from $1.7 billion at the start of the year to $4.35 billion by the end. Other products cooled off in 2015, but saw another strong holiday quarter. This time, the business unit generated $2.87 billion, a jump of about 30% over the same quarter last year, but still relatively small compared with even Apple’s other non-iPhone businesses. Even so, Cook said its wearables business, which he defined as the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Beats headphones, was comparable to the size of a Fortune 500 company.
Sure, it's no iPhone-X, but it's hardly buttons either. My ole gran used to have a saying "look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves", and the same applies writ large here.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The "Android Smartwatch" market isn't dead because Qualcom hasn't released a new suitable SoC - rather, Qualcom hasn't made a new SoC because the smartwatch market is dead.
The smartwatch was always going to be a niche offering, and primarily of interest to a geek market (iFans not withstanding). Adding health monitoring was a good step to expand the niche, but even then these are not devices that lend themselves to an upgrade cycle like phones (once again, iFans not withstanding).
For example, I own an original (Kickstarter) Pebble, and the core functions of caller ID, SMS/email notification and controlling music playback are great, but I don't care about health monitoring, so I haven't felt a compelling need to buy a another smartwatch to do the same things in a larger and less comfortable form factor.
So, the volumes and demand are not there for Qualcom to be able to return a profit on the investment in R&D resources and production costs for an updated SoC.
Oh, and while I'm here, I'd just like to add "FUCK FITBIT" for screwing Pebble owners over...
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Apple made $1.6B in the last quarter on their watches.
The link does not say that. "Apple wearables" includes AirPod (a necessity if you have an iPhone without a jack) and Beats headphones (which I didn't even know that Apple owned because I don't give a shit).
Samsung and Apple are selling far more watches than Android Wear. Both make the chips in their watches. Samsung is the other big ARM player in the Phone Market, but in this case their watch chip isn't designed to support Android Wear, so of course nobody is using it. Mediatek was also supposedly working on releasing a chip, but it never panned out (probably because the Android Wear market never happened.)
firstly you need to learn to read, it doesn't say they made 1.6 billion from watches, the apple division that includes the watch, headphones and many other devices made that. secondly from your own link "The Apple Watch continues to underwhelm". There is no doubt apple is the leader in this segment, but even they are not setting the world on fire with sales and have undershot on all of their own and analyst estimates.
Heck, Apple is so embarrassed by their smartwatch sales numbers
I find that hard to believe. Horace Dedieu of Asymco estimates that Apple is now the biggest watchmaker in the world, overtaking Rolex during the last quarter of 2017.
http://www.asymco.com/2017/09/...
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