Samsung, Google and Motorola to Make AI Watches, Pins, Pendants With New Qualcomm Chip
When you think of wearables from Google, Motorola, and Samsung, you probably think of headphones and watches. But in the age of AI, a whole new world of wearable technology is coming to life, and we could soon see these companies branch out to also make pins, pendants, and other unexpected AI-powered gadgets.
This new generation of wearable technology will be made possible by Qualcomm, which on Monday announced the latest version of its wearable chip — the Snapdragon Wear Elite — at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This new platform will be used by a series of partners, including Google, Motorola and Samsung, to design a constellation of new devices.
Qualcomm’s philosophy towards wearables is essentially “build it, and they will come.” It creates the underlying technology that will power the devices and then encourage businesses to use them as they see fit.
When I attended the company’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii last year, Qualcomm’s CMO Don McGuire painted me a picture of how he imagines the convergence of AI and wearable devices.
“AI is going to be ambient in many ways,” he told me. It might not even be called a “device” if it’s something woven into your clothing or worn on your person. “There are a lot of ideas floating around,” he said.
At the same event, Dino Bekis, who heads Qualcomm’s wearables business, introduced me to the Looki L1 — a life recording camera created with the company’s W5 Gen 2 chip. This is the wearable platform that Qualcomm introduced last year, designed to work with Google’s Wear OS and launched with the Pixel Watch.
At the launch of the Wear Elite platform at MWC on Monday, Bekis said the big advantage of this new chip is its integrated capabilities with a dedicated AI agent engine that continuously supports workloads such as audio, speech processing, contextual understanding and real-time adaptation.
“Why is in-device AI so important for wearable devices?” he said “Because these devices live with you. They see what you see, they hear what you hear. They understand your context, not occasionally, but continually.”
Qualcomm’s new chip design is intended to be flexible in its form. This could be found in many places.
Unlike its predecessor, the new Wear Elite chip will run on Google’s Wear OS, Android, and Linux, with a neural processing unit that enables on-device AI with low power consumption. This is key for portable devices, which you don’t necessarily want to charge every day. Qualcomm claims that the Wear Elite’s advanced power management allows for 30% longer battery usage than the previous version, with fast charging bringing devices to 50% in around 10 minutes.
Energy efficiency was a central design principle for the Wear Elite, Bekis said, delivering Wi-Fi capabilities with Bleutooth-level power consumption. “From day one, we designed the platform for sustained performance over multiple days, so that AI-rich visuals and continuous detection did not come at the cost of battery life. »
The first Snapdragon Wear Elite devices
The real test of the new chip will be what Qualcomm’s partners choose to build with it, and at the Wear Elite launch event in Barcelona, the company welcomed a number of technology partners to talk about how they plan to use it. The first devices powered by the Wear Elite chip are expected to become available in the coming months, with Motorola saying it will use the platform to build more AI-enabled wearables, like the Project Maxwell AI concept, shown off at CES in January.
Qualcomm will help Motorola power AI concept devices, such as Project Maxwell.
Francois LaFlamme, vice president and chief strategy and marketing officer for Motorola, was on stage at the Qualcomm event, wearing a Project Maxwell pin. He described it as an insightful AI companion that can see what you see, hear what you hear, and understand what you say.
“Achieving this level of contextual intelligence requires a powerful, efficient, AI-optimized wearable form factor,” he said. “The Wear Elite platform will allow us to fully explore concepts like Maxwell and go further, even further than we have demonstrated so far.”
Samsung also announced that it will integrate Wear Elite into the next Galaxy Watch. This will make the watch “an even more holistic wellness companion,” said InKang Song, executive vice president and head of technology strategy at Samsung. “The next Galaxy Watch represents another significant step forward,” Song said. “We will continue to push the boundaries of performance and elevate your wellness journey… making the Galaxy Watch smoother and even more efficient than ever.”
Samsung and Google may be focused on watches, but Snapdragon Wear Elite hints at a future halo of personal wearables, which CNET editor as a whole Scott Stein explored in more detail. The possibilities expand beyond what we’ve seen so far as this latest platform is adopted by businesses large and small. I’ll be looking for demos using the new chip this week at MWC – so stay tuned for more.
