Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon Wear Elite platform for smartwatches and other small gadgets, which can power personal AI and enable personal interactions and insights across different form factors such as pins and pendants.
The Snapdragon Wear Elite platform offers the next-generation of truly personal, always-on, intelligent wearable computing devices. The Wear Elite platform works across WearOS, Android and Linux, and has a neural processing unit (NPU) for on-device AI and an advanced suite of ultra-low power connectivity solutions.
The Snapdragon Wear Elite supports on-device capabilities that enable real-time agentic experiences. It integrates the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU to support models with up to a billion parameters at the edge, and then pairs it with advanced sensor fusion, high-performance, low-power connectivity and computing enabling Personal AI experiences, including context-aware recommendations, natural voice interactions and the ability to log your life and orchestrate tasks on your behalf.
Qualcomm says the Snapdragon Wear Elite offers a lot more power efficiency with unrivalled speeds and fluidity, offering up to 5x improvement on single-core CPU performance and up to 7x faster GPU, for app launching, multitasking and smoother rendering.
Further, the Snapdragon Wear Elite supports multi-day battery life, which can reduce charging sessions, while advanced power management enables 30 per cent longer day of use compared to the previous generation. Further, the platform’s rapid charging powers a device up to 50 per cent in about 10 minutes. Additionally, the Wear platform introduces first-of-kind multi-mode connectivity with 5G RedCap, Micro-Power Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 6.0, UWB and more.
The first commercial devices powered by Snapdragon Wear Elite are expected to be available in the next few months. Snapdragon Wear Elite powers solutions like Project Maxwell, which Motorola unveiled at CES 2026. It’ll also power the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Watch as well.
