Qualcomm Announces its Smartwatch Platform - Qualcomm Toq (Update: Now With Specs)
We're at Qualcomm's Uplinq 2013 conference where Qualcomm's CEO Paul Jacobs has announced Qualcomm Toq, a smartwatch with a Mirasol color screen that can still be viewed outdoors in bright sunlight with touch capabilities …
Context & Ripple Effects
At Uplinq 2013, CEO Paul Jacobs put Qualcomm on stage not as a chip vendor but as a device maker: [[a:|Toq]] is a smartwatch built around Mirasol, the display technology Qualcomm backed with a $120 million equity stake in Sharp in December 2012. The pickup was unusually broad for a reference-device announcement — AllThingsD pegged October availability at around $300, with PC Magazine, The Register, Digital Trends and others carrying the story the same day.
The move has a precedent inside the company's own record: Qualcomm's 2009 'Smartbook' pitch failed to reshape its category, and the company spent 2012 fighting Snapdragon supply constraints at third-party fabs. Toq is therefore less a volume product than a proof point — a way to show what Mirasol can do outdoors and to seed a wearable category before rivals define it.
First-order effects
- Qualcomm enters direct competition with the very OEMs that buy its silicon — Samsung among them — by shipping its own wearable rather than licensing the design.
- Mirasol gets its highest-profile showcase yet, testing whether the sunlight-readable color touchscreen Sharp's $120 million investment was meant to commercialize actually works in a shipping product.
Second-order effects
- Watch makers evaluating displays gain a new benchmark: if Mirasol's outdoor readability holds up, LCD/OLED suppliers face pressure to match it in low-power wearable panels.
- A working Toq gives Qualcomm a reference design to push its processors into a nascent wearable market — echoing how it used the augmented reality SDK it launched in 2011 to drive Android developer pull.
Third-order effects
- If component vendors keep shipping halo devices to bootstrap categories — as Qualcomm tried with the failed Smartbook in laptops and now watches — the line between chip supplier and platform owner keeps blurring.
- Wearables could become the next battleground where Qualcomm's mobile silicon franchise extends beyond phones, provided Toq avoids repeating the Smartbook's fate of promise without industry change.
The trend: Smartphone silicon vendors are building their own devices to bootstrap nascent categories, with Qualcomm using Toq to prove Mirasol displays and seed wearable demand for its chips.