Oppo’s new custom Bluetooth chip boasts lossless audio that rivals wired sound quality
Oppo may not have a massive presence in the US, but the Chinese smartphone maker is rather popular in South Asia, and we regularly see itpushing tech limits. At its annualInno Dayevent showcasing what the company has been working on, Oppo is unveiling three new products: the OHealth H1 family health monitor, its Air Glass 2 augmented reality wearable, and the MariSilicon Y SoC for Bluetooth audio.
MariSilicon Y Bluetooth SoC
Last year atInno Day 2021, Oppo introduced its first custom-made chip with the MariSilicon X imaging NPU. Now those efforts are expanding to a new custom chip, the MariSilicon Y. This time the focus is on Bluetooth, and Oppo intends to expand the capabilities of the protocol with the help of this chip made withTSMC’s 7nm N6RF process— generations superior to the 16nm process used to fabricate most mass-market RF chips.
This chip helps Oppo stretch Bluetooth bandwidth to 12Mbps — that’s supposedly 50% more than rival Bluetooth SoCs. Using a proprietary codec and a powerful NPU crunching 590 billion calculations per second, the MariSilicon Y can transmit 24-bit audio at 192kHz — a first for a Bluetooth chip. The company brags that connectivity and audio quality is comparable to a wired connection with your earphones, although we’re sure we could find some audiophiles to disagree. Oppo mentions that its new chip could unlock possibilities for spatial audio on Bluetooth headphones.
Air Glass 2
Oppo’s also showing off its new assisted reality eyewear. The frames weigh just 38g with lenses supporting vision correction. Proprietary resin SRG-diffractive waveguide tech helps deliver the image. This eyewear would fit right into a classic gadget-heavy Bond flick, complete with support for phone calls, real-time translation, navigation, speech-to-text conversion, and other smarts.
We aren’t seeing a consumer-ready product just yet, but this one’s certainly more realistic-looking than the Air Glass we checked out last year. The low weight here sounds particularly attractive, but it could also translate into appalling battery life, reminiscent ofMeta’s Ray-Ban Storieseyewear. Moreover, the real-life applications could differ from the demonstration by the time the product hits store shelves.
OHealth H1 family health monitor
The H1 is a bit of an oddity, coming from a brand primarily known for smartphones. This 95g handheld gadget intends to bridge the gap between everyday health measurements and professional healthcare. It does everything you expect a wrist-worn fitness tracker to do, like tracking blood oxygen, heart rate, sleep quality, and body temperature.
Somewhat obviously, you cannot actually “wear” the OHealth H1, but Oppo says the computer mouse-sized gadget is for the whole family — a centralized health monitoring hub of sorts. It is also aimed at professional healthcare providers like doctors and first responders.
We know little about when Oppo will bring these products to market, or if any of them will make their way stateside, but it’s still always exciting to see tech firms experimenting and pushing the envelope of what’s possible.
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