Qualcomm’s TrueWireless Headphones May Change Headphone Industry
/Today when you go out to buy a pair of wireless headphones you are presented with a plethora of options to choose from. A lot of which are not true-wireless, meaning they come with a band that connects both the earpieces together.
Though there are some true-wireless headphones out there, most of them don’t deliver what they promise. An exception, Apple’s wireless earbuds, do perform really well but come at a great cost. All that is about to change with Qualcomm’s new TrueWireless technology, that promises to deliver three times the performance and better battery life than the banded headphones.
To make this possible, a new Bluetooth Audio System-onChip (SoC) called the QCC3026 has been developed which works on Bluetooth 5 but is backwards compatible as well. This chip is expected to reduce power consumption by 50%, overcoming the battery life problem that persists on true-wireless headphones. In addition to performance upgrade and better battery life, the new chip is supposed to include components that would allow better noise-cancellation and augmented reality audio support.
These chips are also expected to provide sensors for tracking movement and fitness levels. With so much good happening, the price is expected to go high, but Qualcomm claims that with its new chip the price will instead go down, something that took time for people to digest. How can a chip that small do all of it? From what is being claimed it is expected that the chip will sport a quad-core CPU instead of a single-core CPU from previous generations and two DSPs (Digital Sound Processors). All that means is that the chip would be capable of performing multiple tasks effectively and efficiently without any hiccup.
The thing that concerns when so much is being cramped on a chip is the appearance of the headphones, but these chips are expected to be very small considering what they providing, making them fit-in easily inside earpieces without beefing them up. With such a promising technology, we expect to see a lot of cellphone manufacturers wanting to get their hands on the technology.
It didn’t take much time for Oppo to come up announcing their interest in the chip and that they would be manufacturing a true wireless headphone using it, which will come along with the Oppo Find X phone. In the upcoming years, one thing is for sure, people will lean more towards wireless headphones, especially true-wireless headphones. This would make a lot of manufacturers use this new chip or make their own (Apple’s W1), so they don’t become obsolete in the industry. With all this happening, a lot of phone manufacturers will be more likely to get rid of the headphone jack! The Qualcomm true wireless future is not far away.
