Last year was a rough time for Qualcomm as it faced criticisms over its top of the line Snapdragon 810 processor. The newer Snapdragon 820 processor aims to turn things around while bringing its performance up to the mark.
At CES 2016, Qualcomm had announced China’s LeTV Le Max Pro as the first smartphone to use their SoC. Apart from having top end performance, the Le Max Pro is also the first device to feature Qualcomm’s Sense ID and the first to support multi-gigabit 802.11ad WiFi, which is also known as WiGig.
The LeTV Le Max Pro is a large 6.33″ phablet that pushes Quad HD resolution. Under the hood lies a Snapdragon 820 processor with quad Kyro cores at 2.2GHz that’s mated to 4GB of RAM. The processor claims to be more efficient with a 16nm process and it is accompanied by a Adreno 530 GPU. The new processor with quad-cores apparently provides 2X the performance of an Octa-Core based Snapdragon 810 unit.
The Sense ID is supposedly a more advanced biometric feature as it uses ultrasonic sound waves that’s superior than capacitive based scanners commonly used today. Instead of recording an image of your fingertips, Sense ID scans deeper below the skin. As a result, it harder to spoof and it works well even with contaminated fingers. Another advantage is that it works underneath glass, plastics and metal materials, allowing manufacturers to implement the sensor discreetly on smartphones.
In terms of design, it looks like a Huawei/honor device with a familiar antenna band stripes from an iPhone. Strangely there’s still a visible fingerprint scanner at the back which could have been omitted with Sense ID. The rear camera is said to be a 21MP shooter with Optical Image Stabilisation and powering this phablet is a generous 3,400mAh battery.
As seen in the pictures below, it uses USB Type-C for charging and data transfer. Connectivity wise, it also supports Cat 12 4G LTE with download speeds up to 600Mbps and uplink up to 150Mbps. There’s no mention of its availability but you can expect more Snapdragon 820 flagship smartphones to be announced next month during MWC 2016.
