Some Snapdragon Insider missions happen on a keynote stage. Mine happened on the streets of Denver, Colorado, on an electric kick scooter, talking to my wrist. The brief was wonderfully odd: create a piece of GPS art, a drawing made entirely from a GPS track, using nothing but a smartwatch on my arm. The watch in question was the TAG Heuer Connected Calibre E4, and the silicon making it all possible was Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 4100+.
No phone in my pocket directing me. No car. Just the watch’s GPS, its on-board maps with turn-by-turn guidance, and its voice assistant, so I could keep both hands on the scooter and drive the whole thing by voice. Here’s how it worked, what GPS art actually is, and a proper look at the platform that powered it.
First things first: what is GPS art?
GPS art, sometimes called GPS drawing or “Strava art”, is the practice of turning a journey into a picture. You plan a route so that, when the GPS track of your run, ride, walk, or, in my case, scooter trip is laid over a map, the path itself forms a recognizable shape: a face, an animal, a word, a logo. The “canvas” is the city grid; the “pen” is you, moving through it.
It sounds simple, but it’s deceptively demanding. You have to design the shape around real streets, then follow that route precisely; a wrong turn or a bit of GPS drift and your masterpiece turns into a scribble. That’s why it’s such a perfect test for a wearable: it relies on accurate satellite positioning, in-device navigation, and a way to stay on course without constantly stopping to look something up. Get those three things right, and the map remembers your art forever.
The watch: TAG Heuer Connected Calibre E4
The Calibre E4 was TAG Heuer’s fourth-generation Connected smartwatch, launched in 2022 in 42 mm and 45 mm sizes, running Wear OS by Google on a sapphire-protected AMOLED display. It paired Swiss luxury design with serious sports credentials, a built-in GNSS receiver for GPS tracking, a microphone for voice control, heart-rate, accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer and compass sensors, plus TAG Heuer’s own Sports and Golf apps with on-board course and route maps. Connectivity was handled over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.0, and NFC.
But the part I care about as a chip nerd is what was beating inside it: the Snapdragon Wear 4100+.
Under the hood: the Snapdragon Wear 4100+ platform
Announced in 2020, the Snapdragon Wear 4100 and 4100+ were Qualcomm’s answer to a problem that has always defined smartwatches: how do you deliver phone-like responsiveness on a battery the size of a coin? The answer was a hybrid architecture, two processors working as a tag team.
The first is a high-performance main SoC built on a 12 nm process, with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 CPU (up to 1.7 GHz), an Adreno 504 GPU, faster LPDDR3 memory, dual image signal processors, and dedicated DSPs for location, sensors, and audio. Compared to the previous Wear 3100, Qualcomm pitched it at roughly 85% higher performance, the difference between apps that crawl and apps that feel instant.
The clever bit, and what the “+” denotes, is the second chip: a tiny Always-On (AON) co-processor (the QCC1110) that sips power and handles the constant, low-effort jobs so the big CPU can sleep. It manages the always-on display (now in up to 64K colors instead of a measly 16), continuous heart rate, step counting, timekeeping, alarms, timers, haptics, tilt-to-wake, and — crucially for what I was doing — offloaded maps. Together, the platform cut power by more than 25% across key tasks while extending battery life.
Qualcomm framed the whole platform around four operating modes, which is the cleanest way to understand everything it could actually do:
- Interactive mode, the full experience: launching apps, a responsive touch UI, camera support, the voice assistant, and voice/video messaging.
- Ambient mode, the always-on watch face, now with 64K colors and proper kerning for crisp, readable, attractive faces that barely touch the battery.
- Sports mode, the one I live in: GPS/GNSS activity tracking with maps offloaded to the co-processor, so the watch can navigate and record a long route efficiently.
- Watch mode, the bare essentials (heart rate, steps, alarms, reminders, battery) running at minimal power for maximum endurance.
On top of that sat the wider feature set the platform enabled across devices: integrated GPS and Qualcomm’s sensor-assisted positioning, an optional 4G LTE modem (for standalone watches that wanted it), Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi, NFC for payments, 16-megapixel camera support, richer 1080p-class media, and the on-device horsepower for things like voice recognition and real-time fitness metrics, all running on Wear OS or AOSP.
How it all came together in Denver
This is where the spec sheet stopped being abstract. To draw with GPS, I needed three things to work flawlessly while I was moving: precise positioning, navigation I could trust, and a way to control everything without looking down. The 4100+ delivered all three.
- The GPS held my line. The watch’s GNSS, with the co-processor handling the heavy lifting in sports mode, tracked my route cleanly enough that the final shape actually read as the shape, not a smudge.
- Turn-by-turn kept me on the route. On-board maps meant the watch told me where to go next, so I could follow a pre-planned design through unfamiliar Denver streets without pulling out a phone.
- Voice did the driving. Two hands on an electric kick scooter leave zero fingers for a touchscreen. So I leaned entirely on the on-watch voice assistant and voice recognition, starting the activity, checking directions, all by speaking to my wrist.
That’s the whole thesis of Snapdragon Wear in one ride: enough intelligence on the wrist for the watch to stop being a phone accessory and become the device. No companion screen, no cloud babysitting; just satellites, silicon, and a scooter turning a city into a canvas.
It’s also, I’ll admit, the most fun I’ve ever had “benchmarking” a chip. GPS art is play, but it quietly proves something serious: a 2020-era wearable platform, two years on, was still more than capable of a genuinely demanding real-world task, which says a lot about how mature Qualcomm’s hybrid approach had become.