When Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 855+ processor, the company said we could expect smartphones powered by the chip in the second half of the year (ie any day now). Asus has already announced it’s on board, and now it looks like Nubia is getting in on the action. A Black Shark 2 Pro with the chip is likely to be announced later this month.
One thing these phones have in common? These are all “gaming smartphones” aimed at folks who want bleeding-edge specs and performance.
Rival chip-maker MediaTek also wants to capture a bit of that market — and it looks like the company plans to launching its own chip for gaming phones soon.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
- MediaTek Helio G90 Gaming SoC coming soon [DroidShout]
MediaTek’s upcoming Helio G90 processor is designed for gaming smartphones (not unlike Qualcomm’s recently announced Snapdragon 855 - Nubia Red Magic 3 to get Snapdragon 855+ edition [GizmoChina]
Qualcomm’s new processor is basically a Snapdragon 855 with higher top clock speeds. The company says, among other things, it’ll offer a 15 percent boost in GPU performance, which could come in handy for gaming phones. - Black Shark 2 Pro with 12GB RAM and Snapdragon 855+ leaked [MySmartPrice]
An official announcement is coming July 30th, but specs have leaked a bit early through the online database for GeekBench. - Hongmeng OS is not for smartphones, Huawei VP confirms [GSM Arena]
There’ve been a lot of reports suggesting that if Huawei has to stop using Google Android due to licensing restrictions/the US-China trade war, that the company could switch to Hongmeng OS, an operating system being developed in-house. But it was apparently initially developed for something else. - Samsung begins mass production of 12Gb LPDDR5 mobile DRAM [Samsung]
The company says it’s optimized for 5G and AI features… but basically what it means is that we can eventually expect to see smartphones with up to 12GB of speedier memory. - The Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 images leaked [Android Headlines]
The next flagship Android tablet from Samsung expected to be called the Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 (the company is skipping S5 because there’s already a lower-priced model called the S5e). Here’s what it (allegedly) looks like.
I’m actually really interested in this Mediatek G90 SOC. If it turns out to be as powerful as it seems, it will be interesting to see some non-smartphone devices using it. A refresh to the GPD XD+ comes to mind…..
I’d like to see the 855+ or the G90 on mini-itx motherboard. Especially since they obviously are pretty powerful.
That’s just a fantasy, but well I’m at it I’ll imagine things like DIMM slots, SATA and PCIE.
ARM could’ve done something like this, by partnering with Motherboard Vendors in early 2015. Missed opportunities…
“15% performance over Mali G72 MP3” for the GPU isn’t exactly stellar. That would land it around Adreno 512 (Snapdragon 660’s GPU) levels of performance, which is squarely midrange.