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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.
Nobody wants a wristwatch. The market was never big, and is shrinking. They serve no purpose that your pocket watch doesn’t already fill, better. Their market is literally people too lazy to take their watch out of their pocket. Just accept that nobody found the reality as cool as it seemed in Jules Verne novels, and let it die already.
#DeleteChrome
To repeat the GP, because it needs charging every day or so. Wake me up when they can make the battery last 2 years like my analog watch. Even several months might motivate me to switch. But once a day or even once a week is a no-go for something I might only use to tell me the time.
I rarely even think about my analog watch - it's just there when I need it, always reliable, always running, never having to worry about the battery charge. I wear it in the shower and don't remove it for months sometimes.