Leaked code suggests Wear OS smartwatches to finally get snappier

Wear OS smartwatches (previously AndroidWear) is a reasonably good platform held back to extremely poor processors which left smartwatches powered by the combination extremely laggy from the getgo.

For some bizarre reason, Qualcomm never saw fit to improve the processors powering the wearables, but a find by XDA-Developers suggests a new generation of Wear OS processors may finally be on the way.

The current generation of Snapdragon Wear 2100 or 3100 SoC solutions are manufactured on a 28nm process and uses Cortex A7 cores which date back to 2011.

An XDA-Developer reader named arter97 has discovered that Qualcomm had uploaded a commit that adds a device tree for a “SDW3300 device” at the Code Aurora Forum where Qualcomm uploads the Linux kernel source code for its various chipsets.

The device tree source (DTS) file that was uploaded is listed as “sdw3300-bg-1gb-wtp.dts,” with the code indicating the platform is based on the Snapdragon 429, code-named “Spyro.”

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 429 dates to 2018 and is a 12nm chip with 4 ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores clocked at up to 1.95GHz, a significant improvement on earlier AndroidWear processors, which should lead to improved power and much better battery life, especially when paired with 1 GB RAM, as the file name suggests.

The platform will likely be named Snapdragon Wear 3300. Its introduction will hopefully relieve the dry spell currently in Wear OS-powered smartwatches which is forcing many to switch to more proprietary platforms such as Samsung or Apple’s smartwatch platforms.

Via XDA-Dev