Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 coming to India soon

Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 is expected in mostly top-end flagships from leading smartphone OEMs

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Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 supports Quick Charge 4 which powered up a device to five hours of talk time in just five minutes.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 might not yet have debuted in India, but the top-end processor will be coming to the country soon, the chipmaker has confirmed. While the new Samsung Galaxy S8 devices are powered by Snapdragon 835 in some markets, in India the phone runs on Exynos processors. The chipmaker has just announced its Snapdragon 660 and 630 mobile platforms at Snapdragon Tech Day in Singapore, while the Snapdragon 835 processor was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this January

Snapdragon 835 is expected in mostly top-end flagships from leading smartphone OEMs. “The Snapdragon 835 enables premium experiences. Whether you can bring that into high tier or mid-high tier or premium tier really depends on how OEMs package other things around the phone like display, memory etc. And that defines the price segment a smartphone falls in,” Sachin Kalantri, Director, Product Marketing, Qualcomm India told indianexpress.com.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 supports Quick Charge 4 which powered up a device to five hours of talktime in just five minutes. “If you look at the past 3-4 years, improvements in process architecture has really helped reduce power consumption of the processor. A lot of things got optimised down the line and that as helped reduce battery drain. Additionally, we also have Quick Charge which is improving charging time.”

Though 5G will take some time to start rolling out, Kalantri looks at Snapdragon 835 as the first step to that roadmap.

“You should look at Snapdragon 835 as a stepping stone into 5G technology, standards for which are still being defined. Current generation technology is based on 3G and 4G, and they have come to a point where 1 Gbps is possible. We also talked about the X20 modem which can go up to 1.2Gbps. This is going to create a transition from sub gigahertz to 1 Giga Hertz plus. And typically you can say, since you are crossing that 1 Gbps boundary, you are transitioning into the realms of 5G,” he said.

Qualcomm also reiterated that their processors now offer better thermal control.

“All our heating issues are behind us. Even with 820 and 821, we did not have any heating issues reported by OEMs and Snapdragon 835 is even better because we are optimising it further by going down to 10nm processor technology,” he said. Kalantri said software optimisations too help bring down heating issues. “Plus Qualcomm has guidelines for OEMs on how to layout components in a smartphone as to minimise such problems,” he added.

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“We are expecting 5G by 2020. The chipsets will be available next year and the devices in 2019. In India, we still have some work to do in terms of spectrum etc, but it will happen,” he added.

Asked if Qualcomm has optimised VoLTE for India market, he reminded us that the features are operator specific. “So you have to support the operator requirement and we have been doing that on all platforms. We want to make sure that whoever is deploying VoLTE in India, our phones should be able to work with their network. Typically, we have a solution where the same client should be able to work in multiple countries.”

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

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