Qualcomm has introduced its new smartwatch platform that will power the next generation of Wear OS smartwatches. The new platform will offer some significant battery life savings thanks to a bespoke design that no longer takes so many cues from Qualcomm's Snapdragon smartphone work. 

Snapdragon Wear 3100 should see around 4 to 12 hours of day-long use compared to the previous Snapdragon Wear 2100 platform, depending on the watch you have of course. But it's in sports modes where there will be most savings - up to 15 hours of GPS-mode battery life (calculated based on typical 450mAh sports watch battery) compared to only a few hours now. 

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Qualcomm’s Pankaj Kedia said in a briefing with Pocket-lint that he couldn’t comment on whether the next generation smartwatches included one from Google. “At the [October Pixel] launch Google will talk about what they are doing. I can't talk about that but they are making their OS stronger and together we are strong.”

Kedia said that Qualcomm has worked hard on power saver modes across the board. "Battery savers today are software [based] - this [platform has] hardware and software implementation." He also suggested that it would be up to smartwatch manufacturers to choose how these modes were invoked rather than the user. 

Snapdragon Wear 3100 is based on quad-core A7 processors, an efficient integrated DSP, and a new ultra-low power co-processor, the Qualcomm QCC1110, has been designed from the ground up. It's optimised for ultra-low power and helps the watch with audio, display, and sensors.

Fossil Group, Louis Vuitton, and Montblanc are the first to launch watches based on the  Wear 3100 platform. 

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