chip

Underneath the surface of almost every Android Wear smartwatch lies a Qualcomm chip. To be more specific, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400. The venerable chip has seen several refinements over the years, but the base design is practically unchanged. When the Snapdragon 400 hit the market 3 years ago it was mainly designed for mobile phones – smartwatches barely existed so it had to be adapted for smartwatch use. With advances in chip design, and a different use case than originally intended, the world’s largest mobile chip producer has finally unveiled the successor to the 400 series chip. The new mobile processor is named Snapdragon Wear 2100 and, as shown by the name, is designed for wearables and smartwatches.