Qualcomm

Qualcomm had already promised its top-of-the-range Snapdragon 820 chip – expected to be used in next year’s flagship Android smartphones and cellular tablets – will boost battery-life and offer great improvements to photos. Now the company says we can also expect much faster LTE-Advanced connections, and smarter, faster charging.

The Snapdragon 820 will increase maximum LTE download speeds by a third, from 450Mbps to 600Mbps. Maximum upload speeds will double to 150Mbps – currently viewed as an impressive download speed. And speeds could be even higher thanks to support for the as yet unofficial LTE-U standard … 
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The 5.5-inch Ascend Mate S flagship smartphone isn’t the only new smartphone coming out of Huawei at IFA today. The Chinese handset maker also unveiled its new premium Huawei G8 smartphone launching in several non-US markets next month. The Huawei G8 sports a full-metal body and comes in dark silver, gold, and white tones with a 1080p 5.5-inch curved Gorilla Glass display.
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In a press release this morning, Qualcomm announced a brand new technology to help keep us protected from potential malware threats on our smartphones. Smart Protect will be built into chips in the near future and provide “real-time, on-device machine learning designed to support accurate and effective detection of zero-day malware threats for improved personal privacy and device security”. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chip will be the first to feature the new technology when it hits the market in 2016.

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Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 820 chip, which has been rumored to be powering the Huawei-made 5.7-inch Nexus due to ship later this year, will come with a new Adreno 530 GPU, says the chipmaker. The new GPU will offer improved battery-life when watching movies or playing graphics-intensive games, and will also offer significantly improved image-processing when taking photos, said Tim Leland, head of Qualcomm’s visual processing group.

Our Adreno 5xx-class GPU, brings an entirely new level of imaging to smartphones, and is designed to allow Snapdragon-powered devices to capture ultra-clear, vivid photos and videos regardless of motion and lighting conditions and display them with the color accuracy that nature intended … 

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Today in a Reddit AMA (“ask me anything”) held by four employees of OnePlus, the Chinese smartphone upstart fielded questions on everything from when VoLTE (voice-over-LTE) will be enabled in the OnePlus 2 to what exactly happened in its fallout with Android-focused blog Android Police. But the most interesting questions the four employees answered were in regards to why the new phone doesn’t include hardware features standard in other recently launched smartphones like NFC for touch-based payments or wireless charging.
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Qualcomm announced today that it has become the first company to launch wireless charging that works on devices with metal casing. WiPower is not only material-agnostic, in that it can technically charge all kinds of devices, but it can do so at a distance and charge multiple devices simultaneously. If it works as Qualcomm says it does, this could be one of the most versatile and easy-to-use wireless charging solutions announced so far.
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There’s no getting away from OnePlus‘ effect on the market. From the very beginning it planned to be disruptive and offer consumers what they really wanted: A flagship phone at a low price. Despite controversies and frustrations over its marketing and invite-based purchases, OnePlus has gone on to sell over 1.3 million units of its first smartphone. That may not seem like much in a market where companies sell millions of phones. But this is just one phone, made by one small company that most consumers still haven’t heard of.

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Qualcomm, the company behind the all-conquering Snapdragon processors, said today that it will cut $1.4 billion in costs and restructure its board after being pressured by an activist investor to make changes. The move could see the chip-maker cut thousands of jobs as it seeks to streamline its operations. Qualcomm’s revenue is significantly lower than it was 12 months ago, and its chip business isn’t the powerhouse it used to be.

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The onslaught of OnePlus posts teasing out each individual facts about its upcoming phone, the OnePlus 2, continues. Today the company is responding to more concerns about overheating, as well as about the price of the OnePlus 2.

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In a post to its community forums, OnePlus today unveiled which CPU its much-anticipated OnePlus 2 will use – Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810. The company said that the Snapdragon 810’s unmatched speed and ability to multitask while maintaining battery performance had them coming back to it over and over again during their search for the right processor. But don’t worry, the company says it will be version 2.1 of the chipset, a version that they collaborated on with Qualcomm engineers to integrate and fine-tune for the OnePlus 2’s hardware and software, and that (apparently) won’t overheat.

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HTC hasn’t been having the best run lately and that continues today. After promising this past Wednesday at an investor meeting to reinvigorate its line through a new product in October and “improved design and innovation,” the Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer has posted bleak earnings results for the month of May with revenue of NT$10.79 billion (US$347 million), down 50% over the same month last year and down 11% from April’s revenue of NT$13.5 billion (US$440 million). Revenue for April was down itself 33% from the month prior and 38% from April 2014.

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Google’s Tango tablet

Earlier this week, Google made its Project Tango tablet available to everyone via the Google Store for $512. While many expected this price drop and public availability to lead to a successor at Google I/O, the company kept quiet and didn’t address its Tango initiative. Nevertheless, Qualcomm this evening has taken the wraps off of its own Tango smartphone platform powered by the Snapdragon 810.

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HTC has just released its lowest revenue figures for the month of April in 6 years, attributable to lackluster sales of the new flagship HTC One M9, according to an analyst from Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co.

The company’s consolidated revenue was NT$13.5 billion (US$440 million) in April, down 38 percent year-over-year from NT$22.07 a year earlier. This figure is also down 33 percent from promising revenue of NT$20.02 billion posted only the month prior, in March. This is HTC’s lowest monthly revenue for April since 2009’s result of NT$11.4 billion.

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The Snapdragon 810-equpiped HTC One M9 lights up like a Christmas tree during a benchmark

You may recall reports earlier this year about the HTC One M9 overheating during benchmark tests, with many claiming the issue was due to a flaw in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor. Tim McDonough, the chipmaker’s VP of marketing has finally spoken out about the problem, claiming that the rumors are untrue and there is, in fact, no problem with the chip overheating…

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The LG G4 was (purportedly) seen in some leaked renders earlier this month, but today the upcoming handset from LG seems to have made its way through benchmarking software for the first time. As usual, GFXBench seems to be the culprit in this leak, revealing many of the upcoming device’s specs—and interestingly, the phone might be going with the Snapdragon 808 system-on-a-chip.

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It looks like there is definitely some truth to evidence suggesting that the Snapdragon 810 has been facing some problems with overheating. Dutch site Tweakers has taken the HTC One M9 through a series of tests, and it looks like overheating problems with Qualcomm’s processor are still very much a valid concern. Specifically, while running GFXBench, the site has recorded the HTC One M9 to have a surface temperature of around 55 degrees Celsius—or 131 degrees Fahrenheit.

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