Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 and its top five features

Qualcomm introduced Snapdragon 835, world's first 10 nm processor at CES 2017. At its Qualcomm Technology Day in Singapore, the company has showcased the key features of the Snapdragon 835 mobile platform, which is centered around five main pillars – battery life, immersion, capture, connectivity, and security.

The highlight Snapdragon 835 is smaller and packs more efficient transistors when compared to Snapdragon and 821 processors. It integrates more features, is smaller in size and consumes less power to increase battery life in smartphones.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 comes with support for dual-rear cameras on smartphones.

Qualcomm Snapdragon is presently being used in Sony Xperia XZ Premium, Samsung Galaxy S8/S8+, Xiaomi Mi 6 and Sharp Aquos R, though more smartphones with this processor as expected to hit the market soon. The company is planning to ship 3 billion of these.  So what is really new in the Snapdragon 835 processor? We take a look:

Design

Qualcomm 835 features a 10-nanometer design, claimed to be the world's first. It is 35 percent smaller when compared to its predecessor and uses 25 percent less power than Qualcomm's previous chipsets. A smaller chipset means slimmer smartphones with bigger batteries.

Xiaomi Mi 6 is 7.5 mm thin and backed by a 3,350mAh battery. Samsung Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ measure 8.0 mm and 8.1 mm in thickness packing 3,000mAh and 3,500mAh batteries respectively.

Another major focus area for Qualcomm with Snapdragon 835 is connectivity.

Camera

One of the biggest highlights with the Snapdragon 835 is support for dual camera setup in smartphones. The mobile platform allows for a better zoom in designed to capture hi-res images as well as video stabilization. The electronic image stabilization (EIS) technology in Snapdragon 835 processor lets users shoot videos with minimum distortion.

In Samsung Galaxy S8 series, the iris scanning feature was launched with Snapdragon 835. The flagship smartphones use a secure camera. The mobile platform also supports dual-pixel phase detection as well, which can intelligently adjust autofocus in different light conditions, claims Qualcomm.

Sachin Kalantri, Director, Product Marketing, Qualcomm India quoted DXO mark's 2016 camera rating that puts 10 out of top 15 best smartphone camera devices with Snapdragon chipsets.

Battery

The need to quickly charge smartphones is growing thanks to bigger battery size in devices these days. With support for Quick Charge 4 technology in Snapdragon 835, the company is promising 5 hours of talk time on smartphones with 5 minutes of charging. The charging time is said to reduce by about 20 percent when compared to Quick Charge 3.0 technology seen on Snapdragon 820 and 821.

Qualcomm is going big on Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) with the Snapdragon 835 mobile platform

Connectivity

Another major focus area for Qualcomm with Snapdragon 835 is connectivity. The mobile platform now packs a 1.2 Gbps X16 LTE modem, said to be world's first announced gigabit-class LTE modem. It supports LTE Category 16, which offers up to 1GBps of download speeds. This is faster compared to older Snapdragon 820/821 processors that support LTE Category 12 offering download speeds of up to 600Mbps.

Virtual Reality

Qualcomm is going big on Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) with the Snapdragon 835 mobile platform, which offers 25 percent faster graphics rendering, and up to 60x more display colors. This makes watching immersive or 360 degree videos a better experience.

Additionally, support for Multi-Gigabit Wi-Fi brings with it the ability to watch 360-degree virtual reality (VR) videos on smartphones. Qualcomm has added 4K resolution to these chipsets as well. It supports object and scene-based audio.

Disclaimer: The reporter is in Singapore at the invite of Qualcomm India

 

 

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