The next generation of Wear OS it should be around the corner by now, even if it is being kept waiting. Despite the collaboration with Samsung that saw the Galaxy Watch4 series come out, Google is still working on the next release of the operating system to be released for the other smartwatches: after the indications of a couple of months ago, today a new Developer Preview has been released. which allows us to take a further look. In the meantime, some indications on the next dedicated chips of Qualcommwhich should take the name of Snapdragon Wear 5100 And 5100+.
New Developer Preview of Wear OS 3.2, but the changes are few
This week Google released another emulator image showing us i progress made in the last few weeks. In reality, not much seems to have changed since the sighting last December: the interface appears almost identical, with no noteworthy changes in the settings menus, notifications or other features. In practice, Google is proceeding to refine the operating system.
Among the changes we can point out the icons of the apps, now more in line with those on the Android 12 theme (but without a chromatic consistency): these are Calendar, Reminders, Hand-Wash Timer, Settings, Stopwatch and more. The icons now have a uniform color palette in the notification bar. Still no sign of the next generation Google Assistant.
The changes are therefore few, but this could mean that the final release is close. On the other hand, the new emulator image may not necessarily reflect the definitive operating system: we will therefore have to wait a little longer to get to know it more concretely, but we can console ourselves with the latest hardware news.
Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 5100 and 5100+ coming with great improvements
The new chipset dedicated to wearables could be on the way. Today, in fact, new information arrives on Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 5100 And 5100+which should bring significant progress in terms of performance and which according to rumors could be produced by the semiconductor division of Samsung.
The chip was initially produced at 5 nm, but was then modified by moving to a 4 nm production process: this obviously should result in improvements in energy efficiency. Based on what we know, there should be two variants of the chipset: the first called SW5100, with separate SoC and related Power Management IC (PMIC), and the second (SW5100 +) with “Molded Embedded Package” (MEP).
The difference? In addition to the more compact design, the MEP version would support an ultra-low-power deep sleep mode, which would allow you to continue transmitting via WLAN or Bluetooth in energy saving, with the higher-powered cores “turned off”. We believe that Qualcomm can therefore market the latter variant under the name of Snapdragon Wear 5100+. The latter would also offer an ARM Ethos Machine Learning Core, which could be leveraged to detect activity, determine changes in heart rate and detect falls. It should also allow for the use of a 1W amplifier for any speakers and compatibility with better haptic feedback.
Both versions should still be able to count on four cores ARM Cortex-A53 clocked up to 1.7 GHz and on 700 MHz Adreno 702 GPU, with support for eMMC 5.1 flash memory and up to 4 GB of LPDDR4X RAM. They should then support up to two cameras with a maximum resolution of 13 and 16 MP (with 1080p video and video calling).
Snapdragon Wear 5100 is expected to support both Wear OS and Android, plus of course connectivity LTE, Wi-Fi (also at 5 GHz), Bluetooth 5.2 and Glonass (SW5100 + only). For now it is not clear which devices will bring the Qualcomm novelties to the debut, but we are sure that we will return to talk about them shortly.
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