There
are currently two major annoyances with wireless headphones: the Bluetooth can
cut out in areas with a lot of signal noise, and battery life is mostly
terrible. Qualcomm thinks it’s packed a better solution to both of those issues
into a new chip.
“It’s
a big step forward in the hearable category,” Anthony Murray, Senior Vice
President and General Manager of Qualcomm’s Voice & Music business unit,
told Gizmodo.
According
to Murray, the QCC5100 Low Power Bluetooth SoC reduces power consumption by 65
percent. This in turn gives headphones nearly three times the playback time
compared to headphones with previous SoCs.
Murray
also said the Qcc5100 has significantly better transmit power, which should
reduce the number of times headphones cut out when you’re riding a packed
subway or moving through a hellishly crowded airport. The chip supports
Bluetooth 5, which was only announced in 2016, and just began to appear in
devices, like the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Apple iPhone X, last year.
Besides
these improvements, the minuscule chip has double the processing capability of
Qualcomm’s former solution, which was found in popular headphones like the
Jabra Sport Elite and Bose Free Sport.
This
means that the chip can provide much more robust active noise cancelling and
hearing assistance. For example, it would allow for some conditional sound
changes like making sound softer when your headphones detect that an
announcement is being made on a train. “We see this as becoming a general
requirement,” Murray said. And if you look at the wide range of earbuds in the
marketplace right now, and their multitude of auditory bionic features, you
might be compelled to agree.
Currently
there are no earbud makers who have declared they’re using the new QCC5100, but
Qualcomm says it is working with a number of major manufacturers, and as its
previous SoC was featured in the best earbuds of 2017, there’s a good reason to
get excited for what the future of bionic buds holds.
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