Your next Garmin watch could have better battery life than ever – thanks to major platform upgrade

It's Mobile World Congress this week, which means lots of inevitable mobile announcements – but not just the best new phone handsets by any means.

One of the biggest players that powers many of your favourite tech products, Qualcomm, has used the show as a platform to reveal its biggest shake-up to its wearable platform to date.

Introducing Snapdragon Wear Elite, the top-tier chipset for wearables, which is designed with 'personal AI' in mind – and a big boost in efficiency, which ought to reflect in products' battery life.

Wear Elite isn't only for fitness devices and sports watches – like your next Garmin or Samsung – but for other wearables, too, from AI pins, to smart glasses, and more besides.

With up to five times faster clock speeds and seven times the graphical prowess of the previous best Wear platform, there's clearly a lot of power here – which will help with device interfaces running better than ever.

But it's the battery life promise that's a key takeaway from this product. Faster charging compatibility is part of the specification, too, giving manufacturers the opportunity to produce longer-lasting and quicker-charging devices.

The on-board eNPU – that's neural processing unit, for artificial intelligence operations – will also be ready to go in a flash, its low-power consumption a key component that will make its 'ready to wake' position tenable for future AI pins, smart rings and the like.

While Wear Elite shares its name with Qualcomm's mobile chipset – Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 – there is a key difference to the architecture here. The latter uses Oryon chips, which until now has reflected the 'Elite' name, but Wear Elite doesn't go down this route.