Qualcomm looks set to have a good year with its Snapdragon 820 chipset poised to enter the market on smartphones. However, the company looks set to even improve its standing as it recently announced a Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC.

The announcement regarding the SoC was made on the Qualcomm website where the company announced that it would be part of the new Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear platform. Also, the company made it clear that the platform would be used to create a product family that would be used in next generation wearables. The first product that falls within the new Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear range is the Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC. Describing it, Raj Talluri, the Senior Vice President of Product Management, stated it would enable wearables with "sleeker designs" to be created as the chipset was 30 percent thinner than latest offerings from the company.

This will result in smartwatches becoming much thinner this year and possibly smaller. Also, the new Wear 2100 SoC is 25 percent more efficient when it comes to managing power than the current Snapdragon 400 processor which is used on many wearables. This means that smartwatches will be able to last longer than one day on a single charge. There are also indications that the chipset will improve smart sensing and provide better "always connected" experiences to users thanks to a LTE modem that comes with GNSS integrated into it. Two versions of the Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC will be released this year, with the lower end model having Bluetooth/Wi-Fi and the other capable of 2G/3G/LTE cellular connectivity. Importantly, the chip will also have NFC for mobile payments and GPS.

LG also stated that it was already working on creating wearables and possibly even smartwatches with the new chipset and they could hit the market this year. The collaboration that LG and Qualcomm have undertaken was also highlighted in the statement released by Qualcomm.

With the Snapdragon 400 processor used on most wearables, it is likely that the Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC is also going to be in great demand.