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

From faster app switching and web browsing to improved selfies, next year's Android phones have a lot to gain from the Snapdragon Elite chip.

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. The chip was announced at the Snapdragon Summit 2024 alongside Qualcomm's other new products. Apart from AI, some of the best things it can do are far more humble than artificial intelligence: It'll fix several pain points and make using phones less irritating.

Though most of the stage time at Snapdragon Summit was dedicated to big-picture advancements — there was much forecasting of how people will use smartphones differently with what are being called "AI Agents" — the more mundane improvements will start affecting people's phone use the moment folks buy an Android phone that's packing the new Snapdragon 8 Elite.

This smattering of quality-of-life features covers 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'll change our mobile life, the most we've gotten is a handful of cool tricks on phones like those in the Samsung Galaxy S24 series and the Google Pixel 9 family. Apple Intelligence, the flagship feature in the iPhone 16 series, hasn't launched yet, a month after the phones came out — a few Apple Intelligence features are slated to drop next week.