When you receive a notification from your phone, you don't need to wake the main processor to do it. The Wear 4100+ chip used 57 percent more power than this one. Some always-on health features, such as activity recognition, sleep tracking, and fall detection, can be done with the machine learning core in the coprocessor, meaning they might not cost you as much battery life as before.

The W5 Gen 1 is only meant to be used in watches for seniors and kids, where you'll want some of the primary functions to be on all the time.

The chips have a modem that allows them to work anywhere in the world. The modem has limited band support, so most watches won't connect universally, but that won't be the case here.

You should tick tock.

Will the W5+ Gen 1 work with the Wear OS? The Wear 4100 chip is used in many Wear OS watches, but they haven't received the latest version of the OS. There is some positive news here. The W5+ Gen 1 version of the Wear OS will only launch with the most recent version of the software according to the company.

The Oppo Watch 3 will be the first watch to use the W5 Gen 1 when it launches in August. The new TicWatch will be powered by the W5+ Gen 1 and will be released later this year. There are more than 25 other designs in the works that use these chips.

Jitesh Ubrani is an analyst at the International Data Corporation. There were things working against them because Wear OS wasn't ready when the 3100 was launched. The latest version of Wear OS came out late last year, but some vendors didn't adopt it because they couldn't get the latest version of the operating system to work on that chip. Wear OS is ready to go.

Apple has a large lead in the watch space. It shipped more than 8 million units in the first quarter of the year, with second at 3 million and third at 600,000. Competition is getting more intense. A new Wear OS-poweredGalaxy Watch is expected to be announced in August, as well as a new device powered by aSamsung processor, which will be called the Pixel Watch.