At the time when Qualcomm Toq was unveiled, we knew it was just the first step in the company’s pursuit of the wearables market. The chip making giant never wanted to make smart watches but to provide processors and reference designs to its partners. And we may see something like that happening within the next few months.
According to Taipei Times’ report, Qualcomm was keeping an eye on the wearables market for quite some time now. Qualcomm CDMA Technologies Taiwan president Eddie Chang says that the company has “all the technologies needed” to create a wearable SoC; these include low-power Mirasol displays, CPUs and some other components.
With the launch of the Toq smartphone, we thought that Qualcomm will also enter the software side of things and push its own platform to hardware manufactures. That still could be the case, but we’re sure that Qualcomm will support other platforms as well, including Google’s Android Gear.
The smart watch market is just emerging and is poised to grow at a rate of 78.4% per year according to International Data Corp, with wearable gadget shipments eventually reaching 111.9 million units in 2018. This is obviously a big opportunity and Qualcomm doesn’t want to limit its prospects by sticking to one platform only.
We’ll keep watching the entire wearables space and get back to you as soon as we have something new to add. Stay tuned…
[Via: G4Games]