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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.
I don't get it, my 2 raspberry pi's both have very tiny CPU's with low heat and low power consumption. Why don't they just switch to using ARM chips instead of qualcom?
but I think you may have reversed the cause and effect here. It may be that Qualcomm isn't doing anything because the market isn't there. Because, honestly, most people don't care about smartwatches.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
Two reasons:
1. The Qualcom chip is based on an ARM core. ARM don't make chips, they license their IP, etc to manufacturers. For example, the ARM-based CPU in the Raspberry Pi is made by Broadcom.
2. Try running your Pi on a battery the size that will fit in a watch, and see how long it lasts.
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I don't get it either. How can you have a monopoly on something that you're not making? Either they are making them and have a monopoly, or they aren't making them and don't have a monopoly and the market is open for someone else to come in and make them.
If a previous single-source provider decides to get out of the market and no one else even wants to enter it after that, that's simply because there is no market. Which is almost the opposite of monopoly.
Are Slashdot editors trained to pick the stories that make the least sense on their face in order to simply create controversy and get comments? Clickbait for commenters. Damn. Why am I doing this?