Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 710 chip could be a game changer by bringing flagship features to mid-range phones

As flagship devices, like the iPhone X and Samsung Galaxy S9 get increasingly pricier, many of us are choosing cheaper mid-range devices; willing to sacrifice power for price.

Thankfully, with the release of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 710 chip, the gap between the mid-range and high-end may have just shrunk.

Qualcomm claims the Snapdragon 710 is designed to bring premium features to mid-range phones. It also isn’t just a slightly better incremental update, it’s a whole lot more powerful than your average 600-series chip.

For starters, Qualcomm promises the 710 chip will have twice the AI performance compared to the Snapdragon 660, and will use the company’s Adreno visual processing subsystem and the Kryo CPU. There’s also the inclusion of the Spectra 250 image signal processor, which will allow for facial recognition, better noise reduction and better image stabilisation. This should improve the phone’s use of biometrics, voice-based interfaces and will introduce contextually-aware photos. Essentially, it’s a stepped-down version of the Spectra 280.

Another major update is that phones running on the Snapdragon 710 will be the first to support 4K playback, with additional support of 10-bit colour, up from the 8-bit colour support found on the 660-series chips.

On the performance front, there’s been a slight boost over the 660-series chip. According to Qualcomm, the Kryo 360 CPU will give 710 phones a 20% performance increase and will save up to 40% of power during gaming and 4K playback. It might not sound like a lot, but that’s pretty huge for a mid-range chip.

The new X15 LTE modem will additionally offer much faster speeds than the X12 Modem, but these speeds won’t be able to reach the speeds of the X20 Modem – up to 800Mbps.

Obviously, the Snapdragon 710 isn’t a powerhouse, but it’s not really intended to be. It’s good, and it’s way better than the 660-series chips. Most of all, it should give mid-range devices a necessary upgrade.

The 700-series chips were first announced by the company back in February, and the 710 is the first in this series. Qualcomm has already confirmed that the first phones featuring these chips should be out in the second quarter of 2018, so we don’t have long to wait to see how the chip is utilised.