The CES, or Consumer Electronics Show, hits Las Vegas on the 6 January. The CES has been going since 1967 and some of the products that have been announced at the show include the video cassette recorder, or VCR, in 1970. The Compact Disc, or CD, was announced in 1991 and the Digital Versatile Disk, or DVD, in 1996. And now Qualcomm are teasing us with the announcement that they’re bringing a new Snapdragon 800 model to the party… except the Snapdragon 800 processor has been out for a while now, indeed by the time CES rolls around it’ll be eighteen months old. Qualcomm’s image that they tweeted has a distinctive LG flavor about it, so are LG in conjunction with Qualcomm about to release a new smartphone based around the Snapdragon 800 processor? What gives?
I’ve a couple of ideas and the first is that Qualcomm are announcing a new device based around a processor from the Snapdragon 800 family of processors, which could mean the Snapdragon 800, 801, 805 and 810. If this is the case, they we may be about to see a new LG device, at least going on the button arrangement, and it could be based around the new 64-bit, big.LITTLE processor. This is Qualcomm’s current flagship processor, based around two 64-bit quad core processor units in a big.LITTLE arrangement. There’s a low power, high-efficiency quad-core processor for the normal device use and a high performance, higher energy using quad core for the heavy lifting processing duties. The advantage of the big.LITTLE arrangement is that you can have your cheesecake and eat it too, as it combines the best of both worlds. And if Qualcomm are to release a new device based around the 800-series, it’s logical that they may be considering a mark two version of the G3 based around the 64-bit Snapdragon 810, which would likely sharpen up the G3’s performance.
The alternative to this idea is that LG is set to release a less expensive handset based around an older generation processor. The 800 is good enough to keep the LG Nexus 5 clipping along at a decent rate, which is based around a 1080p display. This doesn’t seem particularly newsworthy for either LG or Qualcomm to be teasing the world about unless we’re missing a trick here (perhaps they’re going to release a device based around the Snapdragon 800 for Android One money?). It looks like we’ll find out soon as LG has a press conference coming on the 5 January.