Qualcomm’s W5 chips could save Wear OS from its newfound Samsung dominance

If you’ve been following the Wear OS watch discourse over the past year, there’s a good chance you’re tired of hearing about the Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic. While there have been other high-profile Wear OS releases since the Watch4 series debuted, like the Fossil Gen 6 and Mobvoi’s TicWatch Pro 3 Ultra GPS, none of them have been very good.

What is the problem?

It’s not just that they run old software (although it doesn’t help that Samsung’s watches are quiet the only ones with Wear OS 3 that don’t cost four figures), but also have the same glaring hardware flaws that Wear OS has known for years: mediocre performance and battery life.

Smartwatches are physically small devices; There just isn’t much room for a battery. Unless you disable features like always-on displays and motion detection to wake up their screens, even the largest smartwatches available today typically die after about a day and a half without a charger.

The Mobvoi watch mentioned above is a special case. It has a secondary ultra-low power display built in under its primary screen to show the time when you’re not actively using the watch. With this particular hardware it can take up to three days.

For a phone, this kind of battery life is acceptable. But in a device you’re meant to keep strapped to your body at all times, even while you sleep, charging it every day with a proprietary charger is a lot of friction. Fitness trackers can handle much longer battery life, up to a week between charges. However, their functionality is typically limited compared to full-fledged smartwatches.

Does Qualcomm have a solution?

Qualcomm would like us to believe that it invented the answer to the portable battery scare in its upcoming W5 Gen 1 and W5+ Gen 1 chipsets. Qualcomm has teased new silicon for smartwatches and it looks seriously impressive. Compared to its previous top CPU, the Wear 4100+, the W5+ is about 30 percent smaller. That means more efficiency and more space to fill a smartwatch chassis with a battery.

Qualcomm also claims that the W5+ is “50% better” when it comes to power management and twice as fast as the 4100+ was. These are claims that we must take with a pinch of salt until we can test them ourselves. However, if they’re even remotely accurate, the high-end Wear OS watches of the near future should be in a very different league than what we’re seeing from most big players today. And if these new chips are as good as the company says, we could be looking at a very competitive smartwatch market in the near future, and that’s exciting.

As much as we love the Watch4 series, we’re always happy to see some healthy competition. Our hopes for Google’s upcoming Pixel Watch have been dampened by overly credible reports that it will run on outdated hardware – Samsung’s Exynos 9110 chipset, which debuted more than four years ago. Samsung’s latest smartwatches run on the newer Exynos W920 and are significantly snappier compared to most Wear OS watches from other manufacturers.

What does the future hold?

Despite Samsung’s initial claims of 40 hours of battery life, the Galaxy Watch4 turned out to have pretty average longevity for a smartwatch. If Qualcomm’s new chips are as great as they claim, upcoming smartwatch releases from Fossil and Mobvoi should be competitive in terms of performance, and potentially beat Samsung in terms of battery life (although a new leak claims that the upcoming Galaxy Watch5 Pro will last three days).

We could very well see a future where Android users are spoiled for choice when it comes to good smartwatches from multiple manufacturers. That’s a huge improvement compared to two years ago.