The most powerful android phone in the world right now, this is the first device ever to be running on Qualcomm's next-gen snapdragon chipset it's not much of a looker but this is being a showcase of the chip, Qualcomm saying this is what the next generation of phones will be capable of they're calling it the snapdragon 888 and there are five important things that it can do for your next phone.
The performance jump, this year is actually even bigger than we saw last generation they're saying that versus current flagships it's 25% better when it comes to CPU and 35% better when it comes to graphics but it's actually a little bit more than that because this is the first time that phones are going to be able to use variable rate shading which is the same tech used in next-gen gaming consoles to basically improve frame rates it means that when you're playing games instead of having to process every single pixel individually it can actually group similar pixels together and just treat them as one like let's say there was a flat brown wall in a game and this wall took up 100 pixels instead of making the phone calculate how each pixel should be lit one by one this technology lets it say oh the whole thing's brown i'm just going to treat it as one and this is such a resource saving that games could run 30% smoother straight away and that's on top of the 35% extra performance we're getting from the graphics anyway the caveat being could developers have to integrate variable rate shading into their game for this to work it's pretty good it's a kind of power that means you can open up any game go into the settings crank literally every feature to its maximum ignore the warning signs that come up and still play the game at a silky smooth 60 frames per second plus just the way that they built the chip means that automatically without any extra tinkering at all it'll boost the touch response times when playing games will just feel more immediate now technically it is also more battery efficient but because it's being used to do more because it's being pushed harder i think battery life will be about the same as last year okay but this is what i'm looking forward to the most see it's easy to forget that the chipset in your smartphone is not just about the CPU and the GPU power that it brings it's like it's like the brain of your phone and so there's wider reaching implications like the camera experience you could think of a smartphone camera as a three-part machine you've got the image sensor which is like the phone's eye you've got the software processing which is each phone's stylized take on what it sees but in between these two things is the image signal processor the thing that's actually interpreting what the sensor is capturing and turning it into a usable output that can then be stylized and with this new 888 chip you get a new image signal processor and the interesting thing about it this time is that this is the first time you get a triple image signal processor which basically means you've got three separate cores each able to process their own stream of photos or videos at the same time or to put it another way a phone based on this chip can record not just one stream of 4k HDR video but three you could record proper quality video from all three of your cameras at the same time your main your ultrawide and your telephoto and even if you just wanted to record one video like a normal person having a triple ISP is still useful because your phone can then simultaneously record the same clip at just multiple levels of exposure and then mesh them all together to give you one perfectly exposed output so qualcomm saying that phones based on this can pump out not just good dynamic range but extreme dynamic range plus just the fact that you've got this wider faster processing pipeline means that you can take photos fast like you see in the iphone 12 pro right that can take 12 megapixel photos well phones based on the 888 can shoot 12 megapixel shots 120 times in a second which is obviously useful for capturing sports or fast-paced cat videos i'd say just generally the way to think about this chip is that it will raise the ceiling for what 2021 phones can do like they'll be able to take photos at 200 megapixel resolution they'll be able to take night mode shots in like 0.1 lux of light which is so dark it's technically classified as night vision and they'll be able to capture save and display photos in 10-bit color which to be fair is a super subtle point if all you're planning on doing is taking photos and then putting them straight on social media but if you are planning on editing them then it's a big jump because with 10 bit every single pixel contains just more color information than standard 8-bit so if you wanted to brighten something or adjust the contrast after you've shot it it's got more of an ability to do so without degradation do this bear in mind though that this isn't saying that every phone featuring the snapdragon 888 is going to have all of these features it's just saying that these are the tools that qualcomm is going to offer to companies it's up to them what they take we'll see what happens but one thing that i think is going to be an immediate improvement like right off the bat is connectivity because having a next generation chip means next generation wi-fi next generation 5G and even next generation bluetooth so wi-fi is kind of evolving you might know that right now pretty much every smartphone can access both 2.4 gigahertz or 5 gigahertz wi-fi bands you can think of 2.4 gigahertz like having a garden hose but covering most of it up with your finger this wi-fi travels far but it's a really narrow stream so it doesn't carry much data you could think of five gigahertz like partially removing that finger you all of a sudden get a way wider stream a more powerful connection but the range falls well this chip can now access 6 gigahertz bands which is like the next step after that but with the additional benefit that right now 6 gigahertz bands are almost uncontested there's very few other devices that will be competing for your bandwidth it's like a it's like an exclusive vip club of wi-fi but even if you don't have this even when you're just on the more widely available 5 gigahertz bands this is still faster wi-fi than last year's snapdragon 865, 5g is better here while almost every other phone including the iphone 12s are using qualcomm's last gen modem with a new chip comes a new modem and it doesn't really change the fundamentals it's still 5g you still get the same max speeds but you're more likely to get that 5g you're more likely to have higher average speeds while using that 5g and less power drained because of 5g, you do also get the new bluetooth 5.2 which is one of those footnotes that's kind of really easy to gloss over but i actually think it's quite cool so when you're using bluetooth now to say listen to music wirelessly your phone can only send one stream of audio and it'll send it to one earbud and then what's happening is that that earbud is having to relay it to the other earbud but with bluetooth 5.2 your phone will be able to send two streams of audio at the same time to each connected device which will just hopefully mean that the people who make these audio products won't have to fake it anymore they can create a better stereo experience and one that'll hopefully just sound crispy, oh yeah and underrated benefit of this new bluetooth is broadcast audio where just a large group of people can tune in to the audio from one device you could in theory host your own silent disco with each person tuning in to your playlist through their earphones providing they support bluetooth 5.2 .
Then we've got AI and you might know that it's quite amusing how much companies love talking about and also how the actual benefit to users is often not made very clear but i think the best way to think about it is any phone you buy now will be using ai more and more tasks that were previously done with simple algorithms and commands will now be handed to ai so that the phone can kind of learn and improve how it does them over time for example taking videos whereas an old phone would have had a fixed way of dealing with all videos no matter what you're capturing newer phones can actually look at the bits in your image and improve them like ah that's a cat we're gonna use what we've learned about cats to make it look good oh that part of the image is sky what do we know about skies and so on ai is now being used to only keep apps open in the background that it thinks you'll open to save battery it's used to tell you what song is being played in the room currently referencing it against its ever growing database just hundreds of day-to-day tasks and so without getting into the nitty-gritty of the hexagon 780 AI processor inside the snapdragon 888 the important takeaway is that this can do AI tasks 73% faster with three times better power efficiency okay there's one final thing and i wasn't really expecting to talk about it because i thought it'd be kind of boringm but the new snapdragon has two really interesting security tricks so we live in a world of fakes you scroll through social media you see an outrageous photo you often don't actually know if it's real or not and to be honest anything that's going to get harder as editing software just gets more sophisticated so what this chip can do is add a seal of authenticity onto any photo you take on your phone you can think of it like sealing up a letter so if anyone tries to tamper with the image in sight that seal will have to be broken it does feel like a good first step in bringing a bit of trust back to digital content you see something you'll be able to know if it's been altered and the second thing is it's a new feature called hypervisor which lets you switch between two completely isolated operating systems on the same phone which would let you have let's say both a work and a home profile but in this case because they're completely separated operating systems flicking between them would be the equivalent of switching between two completely separate devices with separate sets of app data okay that's pretty much it the snapdragon 888 chipset.
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