Qualcomm announces Snapdragon Wear 1200 with focus on pet, children, elderly, and fitness markets
The most recent Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platform, Wear 2100, is present in the Fossil Q X Cory Richards smartwatch I tested in May. This new Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor is targeted towards wearables that are smaller, last longer, are focused on location tracking, and are always connected.
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It's pretty stunning to see Qualcomm produce a product just 79 square millimeters in size that has a LTE system-on-chip (SoC), support for 15 global RF bands, and location features such as GPS, GLONASS, Gallileo, BeiDou, geofencing, and Qualcomm cloud-based location services using WiFi and cellular service.
The Snapdragon 1200 platform also supports an applications processor for Linux and ThreadX applications. It is commercially available and shipping today. Reference designs from Quanta and Borqs hasve been developed and are being tested now.
In conversations with Qualcomm, it was interesting to hear that tracking children is fairly common and accepted in China where grandparents are often watching children while parents work. In the US where people focus on privacy concerns rather than safety, pet tracking is less political and more acceptable.
We should see commercial products containing the new Snapdragon 1200 in the last two quarters of 2017. There is potential for success in educational markets for the Snapdragon 1200 with low power and always-on connectivity.