Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Chip Will Make Your Phone Less Annoying

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 Summit 2024 alongside Qualcomm’s other new products. But some of the best things it can do are far more humble than artificial intelligence: It’ll fix several pain points that will make using phones less annoying.

Although most of the stage time at Snapdragon Summit was dedicated to big-picture advancements, especially forecasting how people will use smartphones differently with so-called “AI Agents,” the more mundane improvements will start improving people’s phone use the moment they buy a new Snapdragon 8 Elite-packing Android phone. 

This handful of quality of life features cover a grab bag 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 on smartphones, and despite being inundated with promises of how much it will change our mobile life, 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 launched yet 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 just a bit easier.

AI artificial light source: Dim selfie face, begone!

The coolest annoyance-killing feature is a camera feature powered by generative AI. Instead of removing elements a la Google Pixel’s Magic Eraser, this one adds light where it’s needed most: on your face. 

This feature, intended for selfies, acts like a directional soft light source that can illuminate sides of your face that are darkened by shadow. Once turned on, you can tap and hold to move it around, choosing the angle that most flatters you and fits your surroundings. And if you’re in a creative mood, you can dial the intensity up and down or even shift the color of the artificial light along the RGB spectrum.

Watch this: Snapdragon 8 Elite Adds AI Selfie Video Lighting and Faster Web Browsing

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I got to play with the feature in a demo and it felt delightfully fun and helpful. I imagine it would be most useful to balance out brightly backlit subjects, like when standing in front of a sunset or sitting inside with an outdoor vista behind you. Though I tried this feature on a reference device, I’m excited by the potential to fix faulty photos and make up for cameras that can’t yet handle light and darkness. 

Faster web browsing speeds up apps, too

In a blink-and-you’d-miss-it moment during the Snapdragon Summit keynote, Qualcomm presenters noted that the Snapdragon 8 Elite made web browsing faster. While that’s exactly what it sounds like, web pages load faster, it belies just how many phone operations rely on connecting to the web. Currently, a lot of smartphone apps load web browsing information in the background while you navigate through their app interface. 

“Browsing doesn’t just mean opening up a browser and getting particular information,” Manju Varma, director of product management focused on CPU technology at Qualcomm, told me at the summit. “The applications will use data for researching, getting sports and entertainment news, shopping — all this entails what we call browsing.”

The micro architecture in the new Oryon central processing unit, coming in Qualcomm’s mobile chips for the first time with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, enables this speed boost. As a result, cache capacity is increased and memory hierarchy optimized for real-world uses like browsing data on apps. Switching between apps faster is another benefit from the browsing data speed boost.

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 running Browser Bench’s online Speedometer 3.0 test, which has machines run through browsing tasks. The Snapdragon 8 Elite reference device (not a commercially available phone) scored 33.7, while the device running last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scored 16.1. For comparison’s sake, an iPhone 16 Pro scored 29.6, while my own iPhone 15 Pro Max scored 29.7. (The numbers are just a comparative metric and don’t represent any specific rate of browser processing, but higher numbers mean better performance.)

This improved browsing speed will, yes, even enhance forthcoming generative AI tasks as well as gaming, said Karl Whealton, senior director of product management focusing on CPU and neural processing unit at Qualcomm.

“CPU is in everything. Every single thing runs CPU. Some things run it a little bit, some things run it a lot, but everything you do is going to be improved,” Whealton said.

Xpan takes 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 get the new technology. One feature that chip didn’t get but was also introduced a year ago, Xpan, will debut on the Snapdragon 8 Elite — and it should make dropped audio over Bluetooth less common.

Put simply, Xpan allows audio to transition from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi. This should allow you to roam far away from the source of your music or podcasts and still hear them so 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, one demo showed Xpan in action. In front of me was a wireless speaker, which was blasting music (a pop tune heard over the din 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 below on the first floor. 

This demo showed one scenario, and I’d be interested to see how it handles other obstructions that normally block Bluetooth signals, like distance and solid 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 drop out. This could be a godsend for people in homes and workplaces riddled with building materials that are unfriendly to Bluetooth signals.

Each of these three features has the potential to make phones easier to use. Probably the most common complaint every smartphone owner has is, “why doesn’t this feature just work?” But let’s face it: a lot of stuff does. It’s the growing complexity of smartphones and our interconnected web of devices that makes it harder for them to meet our expectations. 

This applies to hardware and software: Connecting Bluetooth headphones and speakers used to be a challenge, but now we expect it to be quick and seamless. It was a revelation to learn that apps could harness all of a phone’s sensors like the gyroscope and GPS; the new frontier is people’s expectation that all their data can easily be shared between apps, whether that’s health information, passwords or subscriptions. 

So when companies come along and make it a bit easier for things to work in the background, or add a camera feature that seems like a no-brainer in hindsight, it takes a little bit of the friction out of living our lives through our pocket supercomputers.