When you think wearables from the likes of Google, Motorola and Samsung, you probably think earbuds and maybe watches. But in the age of AI, a whole new world of wearable tech is coming to life, and we could see these companies soon branch out to make AI-powered pins, pendants and other unexpected gadgets too.
This new generation of wearable tech will be made possible by Qualcomm, which on Monday announced the latest version of its wearables chip, the Snapdragon Wear Elite, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. This new platform will be used by a range of partners, including Google, Motorola and Samsung to design a constellation of new devices.
Qualcomm’s philosophy toward wearables is very much “build it, and they will come.” It makes the underlying technology that will power devices and will then encourage companies to build on top of it how they see fit.
When I attended the company’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii last year, Qualcomm Chief Marketing Officer Don McGuire painted me a picture of how he imagines the convergence of AI and wearables playing out.
“AI is going to be ambient in a lot of 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’s lots of ideas out there floating around,” he said.
At the same event, Dino Bekis, who runs Qualcomm’s wearables business, introduced me to the Looki L1 — a life-logging camera created with the company’s W5 Gen 2 chip. This is the wearables platform Qualcomm introduced last year, which was 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 that the big benefit of this newest chip was its embedded capabilities with a dedicated AI agent engine supports always on workloads like audio, speech processing, contextual understanding and real time adaptation.
“Why does on-device AI matter so much for wearables?” 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 continuously.”
Qualcomm’s new chip design is meant to be flexible in form. It could end up many places.
Unlike its predecessor, the new Wear Elite chip will work across 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 wearable devices, which you don’t necessarily want to charge every day. Qualcomm says the Wear Elite’s advanced power management enables 30% longer battery use, compared to the previous version, with rapid charging bringing devices to 50% in around ten minutes.
Power efficiency was a central design principle for the Wear Elite, said Bekis, offering Wi-Fi capabilities at Bleutooth-level power consumption. “From day one, we engineered the platform for sustained performance over multiple days, so always-on AI-rich visuals and continuous sensing don’t come at the expense of battery life.”
The first Snapdragon Wear Elite devices
The real test for 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 had a range of tech partners present to talk about how they plan to use it. The first devices powered by the Wear Elite chip should be available in the coming months, with Motorola saying it will use the platform to build more AI wearable devices like AI concept Project Maxwell, which it showed at CES in January.
Qualcomm will help Motorola power AI concept devices, such as Project Maxwell.
Motorola’s VP and Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer FrancoisLaFlamme was on stage at the Qualcomm event wearing a Project Maxwell pin. He described it at an AI perceptive companion that can see what you see, hear what you hear and understand what you say.
“Unlocking that level of contextual intelligence requires a wearable form factor that’s powerful, efficient and AI optimized,” he said. “The Wear Elite platform will allow us to fully explore concepts like Maxwell and to push further — even further beyond what we’ve demonstrated so far.”
Samsung has also said it will integrate Wear Elite into the next Galaxy Watch. This will make the watch into “an even more holistic wellness companion,” said InKang Song, EVP and head of tech strategy at Samsung. “The next Galaxy Watch represents another significant leap forward,” said Song. “We’ll continue to push the boundaries of performance and elevate your wellness journey… making Galaxy Watch smoother and even more efficient than ever before.”
Samsung and Google might be focused on watches, but Snapdragon Wear Elite points to a future halo of personal wearables, which Editor at Large Scott Stein has explored in more detail. The possibilities stretch beyond what we’ve seen so far as this latest platform is embraced by companies big and small. I’ll be looking for demos making use of the new chip this week at MWC, so stay tuned for more.
