Chief among Qualcomm’s newest chips is the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which will bring more AI features and faster speeds to next year’s top-tier Android phones. It was announced at the Snapdragon 2024 Summit along with other new Qualcomm products. But some of the best things it can do are much more modest than AI: It will fix some pain points that will make using phones less annoying.
Although most of the stage time at the Snapdragon Summit was devoted to big-picture advances, especially predicting how people will use smartphones differently with so-called “AI Agents,” more mainstream improvements will begin to improve usability of people’s phones when they buy a new one. Android phone with Snapdragon 8 Elite packaging.
This handful of quality-of-life features covers a host of topics, but three rise to the top: Improving web browsing, extending wireless audio from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi, and using generative AI to apply an artificial light source in your selfies.
We’re in our first year of generative AI in smartphones, and despite being inundated with promises of how much it 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 feature of the iPhone 16 series, hasn’t even launched a month after the phones came out – a handful of Apple Intelligence features are slated to drop 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.
Artificial Light Source with AI: Faded selfie face, gone!
The coolest annoyance-killing feature is a camera feature powered by generative AI. Instead of just removing the elements with the Google Pixel Magic Eraser, this one adds light where it’s needed most: on your face.
This feature, intended for selfies, acts as a soft directional light source that can illuminate the sides of your face that are obscured by shadow. Once it’s on, you can tap and hold to move it around, choosing the angle that suits you best and suits your environment. And if you’re in a creative mood, you can set the intensity up and down or even change the color of the artificial light along the RGB spectrum.
Check this out: Snapdragon 8 Elite adds AI-powered Selfie video lighting and faster web browsing
I got to play with the feature in a demo and found it extremely fun and useful. I imagine it would be more useful to balance brightly lit subjects, like when standing in front of a sunset or sitting indoors with an exterior behind you. Although I tested this feature on a reference device, I’m excited by the potential to fix faulty photos and compensate for cameras that still can’t handle light and dark.
Faster web browsing also speeds up apps
In a flash-and-you’d-miss-it moment during the Snapdragon Summit keynote, Qualcomm’s presenters noted that the Snapdragon 8 Elite made web browsing faster. Although it sounds like it, web pages load faster, it belies the fact that how many phone operations rely on web connectivity. Currently, many smartphone apps load web browsing information in the background as you navigate through their app interface.
“Browsing is not just about opening a browser and getting specific information,” Manju Varma, director of product management focused on CPU technology at Qualcomm, told me at the summit. “Apps will use data for searches, getting sports and entertainment news, shopping — all of that includes what we call browsing.”
The microarchitecture in the new Oryon central processing unit, which comes to Qualcomm’s mobile chips for the first time with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, enables this speed boost. As a result, the memory capacity is increased and the memory hierarchy is optimized for real-world uses such as data browsing in applications. Faster switching between apps is another benefit of increased browsing data speed.
A demo shows improved browsing speeds enabled by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite 8 chip (right, a higher score means better performance).
At the summit, Qualcomm set up demo rooms for attendees to test these new features for themselves. One station showed a simple test for faster browsing that had two phones run the Browser Bench Speedometer 3.0 online test, which has the machines handle browsing tasks. The reference Snapdragon 8 Elite device (not a commercially available phone) scored 33.7, while the device using last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scored 16.1. For the sake of comparison, an iPhone 16 Pro scored 29.6, while the iPhone 15 Pro Max scored 29.7. (The numbers are only a comparative metric and do not represent any specific browser processing rate, but higher numbers mean better performance.)
This improved browsing speed will, yes, even improve future generative AI tasks as well as games, said Karl Whealton, senior director of product management focused on CPUs and neural processing unit at Qualcomm.
“The CPU is in everything. Every single thing drives the CPU. Some things drive it a little, some things drive it a lot, but everything you do will improve,” Whealton said.
Xpan receives audio beyond Bluetooth for fewer drops
Last year’s Snapdragon Summit was also dominated by generative AI, as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 was the first to receive the new technology. A feature the chip didn’t get but was also introduced a year ago, Xpan, will debut in the Snapdragon 8 Elite — and make dropped audio over Bluetooth less common.
Phones can drop connections to Bluetooth speakers when they are too far apart or when they encounter interference. The XPAN feature, which switches Bluetooth to Wi-Fi, can help solve this problem.
Simply put, Xpan allows audio to pass from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi. This will allow you to roam away from the source of your music or podcasts and listen to them as long as your headphones or speaker are on the same Wi-Fi network as the phone or computer they’re connected to.
During this year’s summit, a demonstration showed Xpan in action. In front of me was a wireless speaker blasting music (a pop tune heard over the noise of the demo room) from a phone over a hundred feet away. To illustrate, the demo had a camera pointed at the phone, which was at the other end of the building far down on the first floor.
This demo showed one scenario, and I’d be interested to see how it handles other obstacles that normally block Bluetooth signals, like distance and hard 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 leak out. This can be a godsend for people in homes and workplaces filled with building materials that are not friendly to Bluetooth signals.
Each of these three features has the potential to make phones easier to use. Perhaps the most common complaint every smartphone owner has is, “why doesn’t this feature just work JOBSBut let’s face it: a lot of things do. It is the increasing complexity of smartphones and our interconnected network of devices that makes it harder for them to meet our expectations.
This goes for hardware and software: Connecting Bluetooth headphones and speakers used to be a challenge, but now we expect it to be fast and seamless. It was a revelation to learn that apps can use all of a phone’s sensors like 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 somehow easier for things to work in the background, or add a camera feature that looks like a no-brainer in hindsight, it takes a little bit of the friction to live our lives through Pocket. supercomputers.