There’s not just one fast new chip set to grace Android phones this year, as Qualcomm reveals a spot just under the best for another best of sorts.
As if picking a new phone wasn’t difficult enough. This year, it seems, you might have to choose between the very best hardware in a flagship phone, and a phone with a slightly different chip that is still top end, but might also save you a little bit of money in the process.
At least that’s how it’s looking with a new chip rolling out from Qualcomm, which we already thought had a flagship in the Snapdragon 888, but appears to have another one.
This week, Snapdragon has unveiled what it calls the follow up to last year’s flagship chip, the Snapdragon 865 Plus, which is what we thought last year’s end-of-year announcement of the Snapdragon 888 was, though now we apparently have two. The second chip is the Snapdragon 870 5G, an extra model in the high-end Snapdragon range that’ll likely see a few more variety of high-end 5G phones this year, with some possibly positioned a little lower because of the difference in chip between the current 888 flagship and this new model.
Already, it has a few companies on board for producing phones using the 870, including Motorola, Oppo, and Xiaomi, with the new range of phones expected in the first quarter of this year.
As it is, Qualcomm’s top-end 888 chip is expected in the US counterpart for Samsung’s latest phones, the Galaxy S21 range, so we’re very curious to see where this new chip pipped slightly underneath it will go. It could mean that the phones to normally sport the Snapdragon 7-series in the mid-range might get an upgrade to a slightly faster and more capable 8-series chip in 2021, or that phones with this new variation will offer a slight price reduction against other flagships and provide more high-end competition.
For now, it’s just a new chip expected in new phones in 2021, and we’re expecting quite a few this year as it is.
