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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.
So are regular non-smart watches, designer jeans, jewelry, makeup, a Corvette, and any other luxury you care to name. What is your point? People like what they like.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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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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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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.)
I'm not sure if your trolling or not, but smart watches have plenty of uses. Such as being able to look at notifications without having to pull out your phone, which sometimes might be unacceptable, like in a meeting. I use my smart watch as a second authentication device for my smart home, when someone puts in my door code, the system looks to see if my watch is in range, if not, doesn't open. Additionally I use my smart watch to monitor my heart rate and for someone with a heart condition, it's useful.
So while you may find this tech useless, doesn't mean the entire world does.