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Chinese consumer electronics maker Coolpad on Tuesday announced a new lineup of wearables powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear-series chips. The upcoming offerings from the company will target a wide variety of demographics, ranging from athletes and elderly to pet owners and children, with Coolpad seemingly positioning every one of them as catering to a highly specific niche. No specific models have yet been named, with the firm instead focusing on highlighting its general wearable strategy and implying more details on particular devices will follow this spring.
The Shenzhen-based company vowed to be among the first to launch a 4G LTE-enabled smartwatch for children in the United States, adding that such a product will be released later this year, leveraging the Snapdragon Wear 2100. The watch will support activity tracking and GPS mapping, in addition to being capable of making phone calls and coming with a pre-installed “learning platform” meant to educate its young users on unspecified topics. Coolpad’s lower-end solutions such as pet trackers will be powered by the more basic Snapdragon Wear 1100 and are also meant to be commercialized in 2018. All of the upcoming tracking gadgets from the company are promising to deliver extremely efficient performance that should allow for long battery life, Coolpad said, without elaborating on the matter. The original equipment manufacturer asserted the move is meant to strengthen its partnership with Qualcomm that already saw it introduce a wide range of Android smartphones and tablets powered by mobile-grade Snapdragon chips in recent years. While those products were primarily aimed at China, the next step in the collaboration is meant to be significantly more global in nature. It’s presently unclear whether any of the wearables will be running Google’s Android Wear but that remains a probable scenario given the in-depth support for the OS provided by the Snapdragon Wear 2100.
The latest announcement from Coolpad comes shortly after the company managed to cut its ties to LeEco and negotiate new partnerships free of the burden of the struggling Beijing-based OEM. The firm recently raised $300 million in funding meant to fuel its current business strategy that’s seeking to transition beyond consumer electronics and shift some of its resources to general artificial intelligence technologies. Coolpad is specifically looking to grow its presence in the U.S. but it remains to be seen whether the company successfully realizes those ambitions in the near term given the current trade-related tensions between Washington and Beijing that inhibited stateside efforts of both Huawei and ZTE, as well as China Telecom. Coolpad is showcasing its latest solutions at the ongoing Mobile World Congress 2018 which is running until Thursday.