The speculation that Xiaomi Mi Smartwatch will be another WearOS smartwatch didn’t last long, as Xiaomi says the device will have its own Android-based operating system called MIUI for Watch.
In a series of posts on Chinese social media platform Weibo, Xiaomi confirmed the upcoming Mi Smartwatch will have MIUI for Watch, which is an open ecosystem for smartwatches.
(Photo: MiJia Weibo)
Having its own app store
Xiaomi has previously announced there is a big event scheduled for November 5 in China, where it will showcase the Mi CC9 Pro smartphone, the Mi TV 5 series and its first smartwatch, the Mi watch.
In the Weibo Post, Xiaomi revealed the MIUI for Watch will have a dedicated app store where users can find popular apps including QQ, Alipay, Didi, Keep, QQ music and even a U.S. stock trading app called Tigers Securities backed by Xiaomi.
(Photo: MiJia Weibo)
This is the latest information about the smartwatch from Xiaomi and seems to be in line with earlier reports.
A live demo posted on Weibo Wednesday afternoon by Qu Heng, general manager of Xiaomi ecosystem, showed the user interface on the watch has a simple 3x3 app grid with square icons and a dark background.
As cnTechPost mentioned previously, the demo showed the watch can run apps including WeChat, Alipay, Douyin (TikTok in China), Sogou map, Himalayan, and the streaming app Bilibili.
However, due to the limited screen size and storage, the watch might not support the installation of regular Android apps. So these apps are basically the lightweight versions of the regular Android Apps.
It will be available in White and Black. Pricing is still unknown but given that the release date is coming up soon we should be getting more clues in the days to come.
Qualcomm Wear 3100 SoC
The watch will ship with the c Wear 3100 SoC and will feature GPS, NFC, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth connectivity alongside eSIM capabilities for added autonomy.
The Snapdragon Wear 3100 SoC was announced by Qualcomm in September last year.
As part of Qualcomm’s new Big-Small-Tiny hierarchical architecture for wearable platforms, the Wear 3100 platform consists of high-performance quad-core A7 application processors (Big), a highly-efficient integrated DSP (small), and a new ultra-low-power co-processor (QCC1110) (Tiny).
The new platform on its own increases battery life from 4 to 12 hours when compared to its predecessor, the Snapdragon Wear 2100 platform, although the exact battery life improvement depends on the battery capacity, display size, and device configuration.
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