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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.
Smart watches are literally useless. They're just glorified accessories or bling.
it's Fash the Nation!
Nobody wants a smartwatch. The market was never big, and is shrinking. They serve no purpose that your smartphone doesn't already fill, better. Their market is literally people too lazy to take their phone out of their pocket. Just accept that nobody found the reality as cool as it seemed in Dick Tracy comics in the 30s, and let it die already.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
Unless there is something magic about the Qualcomm parts (or Qualcomm holds patents that are required to build an SoC suitable for an Android wear device) why couldn't someone else who makes SoCs of this sort get into the market?
Does Samsung sell its Exynos SoCs to other vendors?
Does Mediatek make a SoC suitable for a smartwatch?
yeah sure it must be the chip manufacturers fault, can't possibly be nobody wants the shit! chip manufacturers will make whatever is in demand and makes them money.
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.
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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... for the Pebble brand.
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?
"To make matters worse, the Wear 2100 wasn't even a good chip" ....that maybe Qualcomm doesn't need to put up with the shallow-brained crap from the judgmental people that wear smart watches.
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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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.
They have a monopoly, but won't make decent chips? That's just a malfunction of language. They can't have a monopoly if they're not interested in making the chips. Why is no one else stepping up to the plate here? Maybe it's cuz no one wants a smartwatch? Hell, I've never worn any watch. I don't need a clock on my body. I can slip my phone out of my pocket just as fast as I can pull my sleeve back to see a watch.
My dad's mechanical Rolex from the early 60s still runs great after being refurbished a couple years ago.
Seems like the standard mentality of "smart" or "connected" products is, manufacture it for a year or so, works for another year after that, and then it's a brick. Either turned off from the mothership directly, or rendered incompatible with everything else due to software changes. The concept of maintaining aesthetic and practical value for many decades and even multiple owners is totally foreign.
Sure, there have always been cheap and disposable fashion watches as well. The problem is that smart watches combine the high price tag of a luxury watch with the worst attributes of the low-end market. If it's a $25 Swatch nobody cares about tossing it out and buying another, but for watches priced into the thousands... not so much.
Why not use some Mediatek or Rockchip processors in a watch?
you really have no clue about power consumption, do you?
maybe it's because they're stupid,ugly things and nobody wants them. Or can you find anything else on the market which is popular but where only one company is producing them (a category, not a brand - don't say "iPhone").
The chips probably suck because of proprietary software components combined with the unwillingness of a market to improve on its own code base rather than adding more bloat. We had some pretty good apps back in the 1990s that ran on less processing power, disk space, and ram than is available in your typical router today. What did you think you were going to get in the first place from a SoC geared at a watch in terms of performance? While CPUs have been getting smaller and faster they are not desktops or even smart phones. I'd anticipate any smart watches to really just be reflecting that of more powerful devices either via cloud or smart phone connections. The problem with shitty smart watches was never really Qualcomm- but rather an shitty industry problem of bloat and proprietary software of which Qualcomm is only partly to blame..
I think people don't care about the smartwatch because it is still a glorified watch instead of what it should be. A leap in tech is needed to make it what it should be though Apple is nearing the ballpark. If Android Wear matched Apple tech, we'd be within a generation or two of the critical tech mass for smartwatches.
I'd like for it to have full-time EKG as opposed to HR, SPO2, body temperature sensor, blood sugar from sweat for the diabetics out there, a display at least as large as the ionic, Google Assistant, different vibration patterns for different reminders, LTE, WiFi, android apps, accurate GPS augmented by WiFi and accelerometers to get very accurate locations, speaker, mic, bluetooth, etc.
I'd then have everything I need in one place and could eliminate the bulky smartphone. I hate having things in pockets or on my belt. This is why it isn't being pushed. Ultimately, it could replace the more lucrative smartphone.
Frankly, I'm not sure I need the watch function though the computer has to have it.
What's stoping Huawei from Developing a Kirin chip for it's own smartwatches? Instead of paying a HUUUUUGE amount of money to Qualcomm for the Snapdragon 2100 it uses (Huawei makes their own SoCs for their android Phones)
What's Stoping Mediatek from developing a SoC for smartwatches? It would add nicely to the bottom line, after R&D costs are paid.
What's Stoping AllWinner from developing a SoC for Smartwatches? Would be a nice way for them to get in the spotlight.
Whats's stoping Rockchip from developing a SoC for Smartwatches? It would be a nice complement to the deals they have with Asus, HP and Toshiba for tablets.
Maybe, just maybe, What's stoping them is the same thing that stops Qualcomm...
*The market is not there!!!!*
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
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.)
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.
I was trying to reconcile "monopoly" and "does not want to make the chips." Is this a patent issue then? Is that why they have a monopoly? Is that why no one else will make the chips. I know the smartwatch market isn't huge, but it does exist. There are people who like those things.
To be a samsung customer with a samsung tizen watch!
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
I have a tizen smartwath and love to read notification on it and control my note 8 media reader with it .
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
so companies either keep shipping two-year-old Qualcomm chips or stop building smartwatches
When my smartwatch had its 2nd birthday, its hands flipped to "time to" and "get a new smartwatch". I promptly heaved it at the backboard adorning my dustbin, scoring 3 points, and gleefully preordered a new shiny smartwatch. After camping out in the cold and snow for 12 hours, I was first in line to be told that it would be released in the summer, as clearly indicated on the website. I still await this new smartwatch, but timepieces wait for no man. /s
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
It's wrong to blame the only company making chips. Blame all the other chip companies that won't make even one smartwear chip. Or blame Google for not throwing in some money to spur things along.
... goods that have very little market are allocated funds to reflect same.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
wristwatches... But I no longer have the two smartwatches that I bought. Instead, I have a handful of wristwatches, any one of which I wear on a given day, without fail. The smartwatches themselves are long gone to eBay.
The smartwatches were a pain to use and did nothing well, had a hit-and-miss UI that only sometimes felt even partially usable, and they had to keep coming off and on for charging, which meant that I'd routinely forget to wear them for the day (I tried two in succession). I really liked having the time and date on my wrist, though, and once I tried an old fashioned self-winding mechanical analog wristwatch, I loved having this little machine on my wrist that did its job *perfectly* and without intervention and was scheduled to do so for the next 15-20 years until needing, in very quaint fashion, to be "lubed" with highly refined dino oil by a mechanical specialist.
So I've ended up with several pieces of 19th century technology (which is really just miniaturized 16th century technology) that do the job rather well and also are visually fascinating and aesthetically pleasing to look at as they do it. They're maintenance-free, water resistant to 200 meters, really impervious to most any hazard, and when I change them I only take them off for a few seconds to swap, rather than having to leave them off for hours, so I rarely forget to wear one. It does happen, but far less often than it did with the smartwatches.
And as a bonus, telling time now Just Works—there's no need to wake them up (which often required actual "steps" on the smartwatches, despite advertising to the obvious), they just show the time all the time. Even if I'm, day, driving and need to leave my hand on the wheel, I can just glance at an angle and read the time easily. They don't require me to move my arm from the steering wheel and/or do actual stuff to read them.
As a bonus, a reasonable quality mechanical wristwatch from Seiko or Orient costs 1/3 to 1/2 what a smartwatch does, so for the same price you can have several traditional wristwatches that will last many years and offer a variety of styles and appearances and provide redundancy in the case that one should fail... Without the further requirement of periodic "upgrades."
So smartwatches convinced me to wear a watch. Just not, in the end, a smartwatch.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Dumping the shortcomings of Android Wear to the SoC seems like a blame game. Samsung was able to get by with their own 14nm SoC, providing function on par (or even better) with Android Wear, with 2.5 days battery time
Android is too heavy for smartwatches.
Samsung's Gear smartwatches are doing more than fine, but they run way lighter Tizen operating system.
Personally, I was very happy when I got my first mobile phone back in the day, and could stop wearing an annoying wrist watch. Then they wanted me to go back to not just a small wrist watch, but a big and clunky one? With a limited interface compared to big-screen phones?
No thanks. And I don't think I know anyone who has admitted that they're interested in replacing their phone with a smartwatch. So I dunno, how large was the prospective market in the first place?
Smart watches are a niche market and chip makers don't care to service such a market. Clearly this may help Apple Watch, which Apple claims is selling better. Better then what I ask? I think in my travels I have only seen maybe 6 people who have any sort of smart watch. Its a product that is limited in function by its size.
Hybrid smartwatch, with a small display for notifications (charged once a week) and two mechanical hands (supplied from a separate battery, lasting 5 years) is something that makes sense. No, I do not need hands to move away from the display area when I am reading it, thank you very much.
Nah. My early-series Samsung smartwatch charges in just a few minutes, and I do it at my desk. It's only got a tiny little battery, doesn't take long to charge at all. Other than that, the watch runs all day, and all night.
Many benefits. Time (obviously.) Notifications (email, text, chess moves, etc.) without having to drag out and wake up the phone. Lots of watch faces to choose from at any time, all of which offer various interesting and useful combinations of features and looks. Weather. Moon phase (I do astrophotography, so I care.) Timers. Alarms. Step counting. Etc. All right there for me to see, no phone fiddling required. the watch does bluetooth and wifi, so it's pretty well connected when it needs to be. It can proxy basic phone functions, too.
The only thing I'd really like to see is longer battery life. But until / unless displays start consuming a lot less power, that's not a chip problem... that's a display problem.
--fyngyrz*
* Anon due to mod points, because Slashdot moderation rules are stupid. Soylent News does it better. A lot better.
It's the other way around:
Most people wouldn't use them, which is why people aren't buying them, which is why people don't make chips specifically for it.
That said, we could have had them in the 1980's. An LCD watch lasts for years on a tiny battery. Make that LCD screen a generic matrix like on almost every piece of electronic equipment manufactured at the time.
Now put a tiny radio in it that receives only and puts what's received on the screen. Now put a bunch of buttons on it that only actively transmit when pressed. Literally the tech is ancient. Apart from voice-recognition on the device, which the attached phone can do from your pocket anyway, you just needed a mic / transmit button and you could emulate that.
You could couple that to a smartphone-like device in the same way as AndroidWear etc. does, using tech from the 80's. Nobody ever bothered. Because... what's the point? You still need the smartphone.
Miniaturising the smartphone itself is dumb. You lose any function that relies on the screen being practical to see / type on. But sending the same content to a watch display and taking input? Easy. The fact nobody did it back then tells you why... it's not the tech that was in the way, it's the use-case.
I don't know about anyone else, but my first reaction to a tech is normally right, and normally the one I keep throughout my life. Smartphones were really cool at first, but underpowered and overpriced. When the power and price changed, I got on. Bluetooth headsets just made you look a twat and were only useful if you needed to use both hands (which presumably meant you should be concentrating and not on a phone call). I don't see as many people with them nowadays, they've died a death and people just use the phone like a phone. But Bluetooth was a fabulous idea, it just suffered from...battery life, cost, range, etc. all of which have been solved.
But my first reaction to smartwatches was along the lines of "Sure, you look like Bond... but what's the point?" and that's something that hasn't gone away. The use-case of a smartwatch is still just as obscure as ever and they lie firmly in the range of "fancy gadget". Hell, if anything they are just glorified fitness trackers and they were around in the 80's (there's a scene in the original Ghostbusters with a guy whose watch monitors his heart-rate and steps).
The coolness of the tech doesn't trump the necessity of a decent use case. We can miniaturise things to fit on the head of a pin, but unless we need a microwave oven that fits on the head of a pin, what's the point?
I got my SmartWatch as a present. I didn't think I had much need. But having one is helpful but not essential.
For me really useful to get calendar alerts for meetings when I don't have my phone in my pocket when walking around the office.
Smartwatches are niche, just the reality of it.
Apple watches lives in a separate realm because Apple successfully sold it's image as a status symbol of fanboys and such, which is harder on Android land.
Truth of the matter is though that the first generations of Android watches didn't sell enough to justify investing more on it.
Qualcomm doesn't have a domination on making chips for smartwatches because they somehow blocked others from trying. It's just that not many chipmakers are even interested in investing much on that area. It's too much investment for something that people don't seem to be buying much. So it isn't really "Qualcomms fault" if they don't want to invest in something that doesn't seem to turn a profit for them. They are also not blocking any other chipmaker from trying.
Here's the thing though: you can go into eBay, Aliexpress, Gearbest and other chinese vendors websites and get an Android smartwatch for half, if not one fourth the price of big brand smartwatches right now.
I know western tech blogs don't cover it all that much, perhaps another thing that big brands successfully managed to hide because I see no other reason for this to have happened.
I have a couple of chinese brand smartwatches. They fit my needs. It runs a kind of customized version of Android 5.1, I can make calls with them, and they last enough for my needs (take them when I go for a run). It's really an emergency device as I'm not all too interested in health app crap, but they can also do that. It also has access to the full app store, though things work kinda janky as you are trying to run smartphone apps on a watch that has a round display.
The entire problem of it, and the reason why lots of people who bought smartwatches on a wim have them collecting dust in the bottom of some drawer right now, is usability.
Most people get those to track stuff, and they abandon them as soon as they get tired of the tracking game. I tried that before buying one on my smartphone and quickly realized it's something not worth bothering with. Like I said though, a smartwatch is useful when you want to still be reachable in an emergency, but don't wanna cary a smartphone around.
For that, a 100 bucks chinese smartwatch that can take a SIM card is good enough. And to make things worse, as chinese smartwatch manufacturers have probably realized, improving SoC and other functions isn't really all that necessary. Even chinese smartwatches have stopped evolving around a year ago... they are still all on Android 5.1, the hardware hasn't evolved much.
Android Wear is getting killed IN THE MARKET. Google has NOT ANNOUNCED it is discontinuing the product or support for it.
That's right. Bedroom analysis starting Jan 2018 has revealed the startling reality that my bed has not been made at all. Even worse, the same analysis has indicated that YOU have not once engaged in making it. So it's all your fault.
Pebble Time Steel is one of my favorite devices as it seems to tick all the boxes.
The problem with android wear is in my opinion is that the fundamentals of what its trying to do is just too much. Give us battery life of at least a week. Give us a always on display so it works as a watch first. Why have a AMOLED screen on a device thats on your wrist when you have a smart phone with an amazing screen in your pocket ? Physical hardware buttons actually make more sense on a watch. A touch screen on a device with a 2inch screen or less barely makes any sense. Why have WIFI on a watch?
Why not go back to the old says.
QNX - 2meg kernel, code in C/low level. Not fricken 10000 libraries.
No SQL
No XML
Do it all in ASM, like a gameboy game.... you can do a full nice watch under 256k code.
Yo all modern whipper snappers are useless writing full on apps under 64kb.
Just give it a C64 Basic interpreter that would even work, a C64 watch at that size would LOOK VERY cool, and run for weeks.
Java retards.
...the death of Android Wear is Appleâ(TM)s fault.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...