Qualcomm Technologies Inc. is going all-in with its wearable program, expanding its Snapdragon platform for the segment of fitness trackers, smartwatches, hearables and more.
Called Snapdragon Wear, the company is growing its investments and created a new program called Qualcomm Wearables Ecosystem Accelerator to foster adoption of use of the Snapdragon platform among wearable vendors.
So far, Qualcomm has more than 60 companies involved in the program including Arm, BBK, Fossil, Oppo, Verizon, Vodafone and Zebra.
Qualcomm said the wearables segment has been growing at a rapid pace with products targeted across all markets for consumer and enterprise use cases such as kids, teens, adults and seniors.
“The wearables market grew 21% year-over-year and shows no signs of slowing down,” said Jitesh Ubrani, Research Manager for mobile device trackers at IDC. “Innovative form factors continue to emerge as consumers demand new use cases in wearable devices. The smartwatch segment is going well beyond health and fitness tracking, expanding across consumer and enterprise segments, and further fueling growth of the category.”
Qualcomm plans to invest in new Snapdragon Wear platforms to meet these different categories of wearables including multiple operating systems, a range of software releases and reference designs.
Over the last five years, the company has shipped 40+ million units across 100+ countries, collaborated with 75+ device manufacturers and 25+ service providers while shipping 250+ wearables products – that is one new product, on average, per week.
