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.

Comments

Re:Who cares?

[Scutter]

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.

Re:There's a reason

[Space cowboy]

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.

Re:Who cares?

[sizzlinkitty]

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.