With each passing 12 months, our phones get smarter, extra succesful and more proficient at dealing with something we throw at them with pace and precision. Maybe the largest contributing think about enabling this endless cycle of enchancment is the recent set of chips that we get on a yearly foundation.
In terms of the highest Android phones, nearly the entire main producers, Google apart, use Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm. On Wednesday, on the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm introduced its newest flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
That is the processor that can energy your subsequent Android flagship cellphone — whether or not it is from Samsung, Xiaomi, Honor or OnePlus, you possibly can just about wager on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 being tucked away inside.
Each technology of chip brings essential pace enhancements to a cellphone’s efficiency, and Qualcomm says the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is the quickest cell CPU on the earth. However that is not all. Qualcomm has tailor-made the chip to supply feature-specific enhancements — three of which have caught my eye as being notably thrilling. Here is what to anticipate.
Watch this: All the things Introduced on the Snapdragon Summit 2025 Keynote in 21 Minutes
AI, however customized
AI brokers have grow to be one other a part of our AI vernacular, and Qualcomm’s new chip has extra help for agentic AI, like Private Scribe.
Qualcomm has been on the forefront of creating our telephones highly effective sufficient to run AI purposes, however the newest chip particularly permits a way more private AI expertise.
Qualcomm’s Private Scribe is an agentic AI assistant that may make suggestions and act in your behalf primarily based in your routine and preferences. For instance, the Scribe is aware of you would use extra free time in your day, so it’d counsel some non-essential conferences or duties that you would push to create space.
Private Scribe is a product of Qualcomm’s new Sensing Hub, which may study you and your conduct as you employ your cellphone to allow agentic AI. The premise of agentic AI is that it’ll sit throughout your apps and companies, deploying the data and understanding it has about you to make suggestions and take motion in methods that can profit you.
One large advantage of Private Scribe is that, as a Qualcomm chip characteristic, it might probably carry that data to the very core of your system, permitting for an excellent private expertise of utilizing AI.
Professional-level digital camera instruments
These are the cameras on the Galaxy S25 Extremely, which is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Elite chip.
If every part is content material, everybody with a cellphone is, to some extent, a content material creator lately. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is a creator’s dream, because it’s the primary cell platform to document within the Superior Skilled Video Codec. Not solely does this imply your HDR video content material will look astonishingly crisp, clear and easy, but it surely additionally makes it simpler to edit with out compromising on any of that high quality.
Each phone-maker has its personal distinctive digital camera setup — a mixture of {hardware} and software program that it believes will make your images and movies look their absolute best. However some enhancements to photograph high quality have to return from the chip-level tech, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will open up new recording capabilities on any cellphone that features it.
Higher sound throughout
Here’s a Galaxy S25 Extremely and its AI-powered audio eraser software. Qualcomm’s new processor provides much more audio fixes for future Samsung and Android telephones.
It is not simply digital camera enhancements that can enhance your content material. The 8 Elite Gen 5 additionally options Snapdragon Audio Sense, a brand new microphone know-how with built-in wind noise rejection, audio zoom and HDR audio. It permits for the recording of 24-bit audio in any surroundings, which ought to, in idea, get rid of the necessity to use supplementary exterior mics.
On the listening aspect of issues, Qualcomm’s XPAN know-how will permit your cellphone to hook up with your headphones through Wi-Fi as a substitute of Bluetooth for superior connection and audio high quality. This untethers you out of your cellphone, permitting you to hearken to 24-bit, 96kHz lossless music whereas additionally with the ability to obtain calls and messages and work together with AI assistant from anyplace you are sporting your headphones.
