Chief among Qualcomm’s latest chips is the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which will bring more AI features and faster speeds to next year’s top Android phones. It was announced at the Snapdragon Summit 2024 alongside Qualcomm’s other new products. But some of the best things it can do are much more modest than artificial intelligence: It will solve several pain points that will make using phones less annoying.
While most of the stage time at the Snapdragon Summit was dedicated to big developments, especially predicting how people will use smartphones differently with so-called ‘AI Agents’, the more mundane improvements will start to improve people’s phone use once they get a new buy. Android phone with Snapdragon 8 Elite packaging.
This handful of quality-of-life features covers a whole range of topics, but three rise to the top: improving web browsing, extending wireless audio from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi, and using generative AI to add an artificial light source to your selfies. to fit.
We’re in our first year of generative AI on smartphones, and despite being inundated with promises about how much this will change our mobile lives, the most we’ve gotten are a handful of cool tricks on phones like the Samsung Galaxy S24- series and Google Pixel 9 family. Apple Intelligence, the flagship of the iPhone 16 series, has not yet launched a month after the phones came out; a handful of Apple Intelligence features are expected to disappear next week.
So it’s refreshing to see new features in the Snapdragon 8 Elite that will make the way we currently use phones a little easier.
This demo of the AI lighting feature shows how it can improve selfies.
AI artificial light source: dim the selfie face, away!
The coolest feature that kills annoyance is a camera feature powered by generative AI. Instead of removing elements like Google Pixel’s Magic Eraser, it adds light where it’s needed most: on your face.
This feature, intended for selfies, works as a focused soft light source that can illuminate areas of your face that are darkened by shadows. Once enabled, you can tap and hold to move it, choosing the angle that most flatters you and suits your surroundings. And if you’re feeling creative, you can turn the intensity up and down or even shift the color of the artificial light along the RGB spectrum.
Check this out: Snapdragon 8 Elite Adds AI Selfie Video Lighting and Faster Web Browsing
I got to play with the feature in a demo and it felt wonderfully fun and useful. I imagine it would be most useful to balance brightly backlit subjects, such as when you’re standing in front of a sunset or sitting indoors with a view outside behind you. Although I tried this feature on a reference device, I’m excited about its ability to correct flawed photos and compensate for cameras that can’t yet handle light and darkness.
Faster web browsing also speeds up apps
In a snap during the Snapdragon Summit keynote, Qualcomm presenters noted that the Snapdragon 8 Elite made browsing the web faster. While that’s exactly what it sounds like: web pages load faster, it belies how much phone operations rely on being connected to the Internet. Currently, many smartphone apps load browsing information in the background while you navigate through their app interface.
“Browsing doesn’t just mean opening a browser and getting some information,” Manju Varma, director of product management focused on CPU technology at Qualcomm, told me at the summit. “The applications will use data for research, receiving sports and entertainment news, shopping – all this involves what we call browsing.”
The microarchitecture in Oryon’s new central processing unit, which comes for the first time in Qualcomm’s mobile chips with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, makes this speed boost possible. As a result, the cache capacity is increased and the memory hierarchy is optimized for real-world use, such as browsing data in apps. Faster switching between apps is another benefit of the browsing data speed boost.
A demo shows improved browsing speeds powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite 8 chip (right, a higher score means better performance).
During the summit, Qualcomm set up demo rooms where attendees could test these new features for themselves. One station showed a simple test for faster browsing, with two phones running Browser Bench’s online Speedometer 3.0 test, where machines perform browsing tasks. The Snapdragon 8 Elite reference device (not a commercially available phone) scored 33.7, while last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 device scored 16.1. For comparison, an iPhone 16 Pro scored 29.6, while my own iPhone 15 Pro Max scored 29.7. (The numbers are only a comparative measure and do not represent specific browser processing speed, but higher numbers mean better performance.)
This improved browsing speed will, yes, even improve future generative AI tasks and gaming, says Karl Whealton, senior director of product management focused on CPU and neural processing unit at Qualcomm.
“CPU is in everything. Everything runs on the CPU. Some things run a little, some things run a lot, but everything you do is going to be improved,” Whealton said.
Xpan takes audio further than Bluetooth, for fewer interruptions
Last year’s Snapdragon Summit was also dominated by generative AI, as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was the first to get the new technology. One feature the chip didn’t get but was also introduced a year ago, Xpan, will debut on the Snapdragon 8 Elite – and it should make audio dropouts over Bluetooth less common.
Phones can disconnect from Bluetooth speakers if they are too far apart or if they experience interference. The XPAN feature, which offloads Bluetooth to Wi-Fi, could help solve this problem.
Simply put, Xpan allows audio to move from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi. This should allow you to move far away from the source of your music or podcasts and still hear them, as long as your headphones or speaker are on the same Wi-Fi network as the phone or computer they’re connected to.
At this year’s summit, Xpan was shown in action in one demo. In front of me was a wireless speaker, blasting music (a pop tune that could be heard over the noise of the demo room) from a phone a hundred feet away. To illustrate, the demo had a camera pointed at the phone, which was on the other side of the building, way down on the first floor.
This demo showed one scenario, and I’d like to see how it handles other obstacles that normally block Bluetooth signals, such as distance and solid walls. But if it works, that’s one less annoyance you’ll have to deal with, as your local Wi-Fi network serves as a backup to ensure your music and podcasts don’t drop out. This could be a godsend for people in homes and workplaces filled with building materials that are unfriendly to Bluetooth signals.
Each of these three features has the potential to make phones easier to use. Probably the most common complaint from every smartphone owner is, “Why doesn’t this feature just work? workBut let’s be honest: a lot of things do. It’s the growing complexity of smartphones and our interconnected web of devices that makes it harder for them to meet our expectations.
This applies to hardware and software: connecting Bluetooth headphones and speakers used to be a challenge, but now we expect it to be done quickly and seamlessly. It was a revelation to learn that apps could leverage all of a phone’s sensors, like the gyroscope and GPS; the new frontier is people’s expectation that all their data can be easily shared between apps, whether it’s health information, passwords, or subscriptions.
So when companies come along and make it a little easier to keep things running in the background, or add a camera feature that seems like a no-brainer in retrospect, it takes away a bit of the friction of living our lives by the seat of our pants. supercomputers.
