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Can you get excited about a microchip? If you’ve never chosen your phone based on the chip inside, that may be worth considering when Snapdragon 8 Elite phones start to arrive. Qualcomm is doing for the next generation of smartphones what it recently did for Windows laptops, and phones that realize its vision will be different from anything we’ve seen before.

Last year, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon X Elite chipset, a powerful processor that uses the sort of low-power cores normally found in smartphones. The obvious benefit is incredible battery life, since mobile processors are made to sip juice, not gulp. That benefit is now coming to smartphones, and I’m expecting great battery life gains in the next generation. All-day battery life is going to be the rule, not a rarity.

With the Snapdragon X Elite, Qualcomm created an incredibly powerful new chipset that includes its Oryon processing core. The X Elite is truly supercharged. The result was the fastest Windows laptops you could buy, and the first Windows laptops in years that could outperform a premium MacBook Pro.

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon introduces the Snapdragon 8 Elite (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

This year, Qualcomm flew TechRadar to Maui for its Snapdragon Summit, and to check out the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, which brings that Oryon core to smartphones. After all the speeches and bluster, I got to actually put the chips to work. Qualcomm provided a reference sample phone for benchmark comparisons – and the results completely blew me away.

I'm not usually a benchmark guy, but... wow!

I don’t let benchmark scores influence my reviews – I rely on my real-world testing and experience – but benchmarks can be handy for quick comparison. Take these results with a dash of salt, but the difference between the Snapdragon 8 Elite and all of the other phones I’ve tested is dramatic.

I tested the new Snapdragon 8 Elite alongside a Galaxy S24 Ultra, an iPhone 16 Pro, and even a Google Pixel 9 Pro (for laughs, the Pixel is terrible at benchmarks). Of course the new Snapdragon beat the older Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in the Galaxy, but could it beat the iPhone? The results weren’t even close.

Running the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme test, the iPhone scored 4,086 while the Snapdragon turned in a whopping 7,019. On the GFX Manhattan 3.1 test, the iPhone drew 3,647 frames, while the Snapdragon produced 7,452 frames, more than twice as many. Again, these are only benchmarks, but those differences are stark.

(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

What’s much more interesting is how the Snapdragon 8 Elite compares to laptop chips. Compared to an Intel Core Ultra 7, the Snapdragon 8 Elite beat Intel’s laptop chip in Geekbench on single-core performance, and came very close on multi-core testing.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite beat a laptop chip – what does mean for the future of phones?

Qualcomm may have created a mobile chipset that performs as well as a PC. I can’t be sure until I’ve used a final, production handset with a Snapdragon 8 Elite inside, like the Asus ROG Phone 9; but for the first time ever, we may see comparable power from the best phones and best laptops.

App developers are bringing mobile apps closer in function to their desktop counterparts, but we may soon get identical versions of Adobe Lightroom or Microsoft Excel across Android and Windows, not to mention all the games we could finally play on a phone.

I’m very excited about what this means for a concept like Samsung’s DeX. With DeX, I plug my phone into a monitor and keyboard and I can use it like a desktop. If the next Galaxy S25 Ultra has a Snapdragon 8 Elite inside, DeX won’t just be a convenient way to write long emails and play mobile games on a big screen. With real PC power, my phone could replace the Surface Go laptop I use for work.

With great power comes a great big price tag

The problem is that power is expensive. Qualcomm is driving hard to beat the competition with this latest chip, both in terms of processing performance as well as power management. Manufacturing the Snapdragon 8 Elite will be more expensive than producing previous chips, and rumors suggest it will cost a lot more than the last generation, for the phone makers that buy it.

If it costs Samsung or OnePlus $40 (US estimate) more per chip, I would expect that equates to a $100 / £100 / AU$200 price increase for the phone. The prices of many of the best Android phones went up this year, and that trend is likely to continue.

Would I pay $1,400 / £1,350 / AU$2,400 for a Galaxy S25 Ultra? Maybe, if the Ultra truly can replace a laptop computer.

Qualcomm SVP Chris Patrick talks about what the Snapdragon 8 Elite can do (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

I’m not sure if a phone/laptop hybrid would appeal to most folks, but I can imagine businesses deciding to buy one device instead of supplying employees with a phone and a laptop. If we see some good accessories that make it easy to use Snapdragon 8 Elite phones as a PC replacement, I think we’ll see phone makers selling devices with that purpose front and center.

Everything about your smartphone is going to improve when you have a chip this fast inside, from browsing the web to playing games to getting things done. Your network connection will seem faster, because the phone will be able to process the data more quickly and load pages much faster than before.

Honestly, we don’t even know what the future will hold when phones are this powerful, because our imagination has limited this power to big, heavy machines with gigantic batteries and a keyboard attached. I’m hoping to see entirely new categories of games, and new app concepts that will make yesterday’s phone seem primitive. I’ll also be happy if I can rely on my next phone to last all day, like my laptop.

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• Xiaomi 15, Honor Magic 7, and more Android phones confirmed to feature the Snapdragon 8 Elite

Meta has just announced plans to bring back facial recognition technology to Facebook and Instagram. This time it's a security measure to help combat "celeb-bait" scams and restore access to compromised accounts.

"We know security matters, and that includes being able to control your social media accounts and protect yourself from scams," wrote the Big Tech giant in a blog post published on Monday, October 21.

Meta wants to use facial recognition technology to detect scammers who use images of public figures to carry out attacks. The company is proposing to compare images on adverts or suspicious accounts with celebrities' legitimate photos. The facial recognition tech will also allow regular Facebook and Instagram users to regain access to their own accounts if locked or hijacked. They'll be able to verify their identity through video selfies which can then be matched to their profile pictures. Handy, sure, but can I trust Meta with my biometrics?

The Big Tech giant promises to take a "responsible approach" which includes encrypting video selfies for secure storage, deleting any facial data as soon as it’s no longer needed, and not using these details for any other purpose. Yet, looking at Meta's track record regarding protecting and misusing its users' information and I'm concerned.

Meta's broken promises

Facebook's parent company has repeatedly breached the privacy, and trust, of its users in the past.

The 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal was probably the turning point. It shed light on how the personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users was misused for targeting political advertising, predominately during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

The company implemented significant changes around user data protection after that but Meta's privacy breaches have continued.

Only this year Meta admitted to having scraped all Australian Facebook posts since 2007 to train its AI model without giving the option to opt-out. The company was also hit with a major fine (€91 million) in Europe for incorrectly storing social media account passwords in unencrypted databases. The year before, January 2023, Meta was hit by an even bigger fine (€390 million) for serving personalized ads without the option to opt out and illicit data handling practices.

It's certainly enough to make me skeptical of Meta's good intentions and big promises.

I’m curious what privacy advocates think about Meta’s new plan to use facial recognition to help locked-out users. Getting locked out of Facebook or Instagram is a huge problem.But this is also a reminder we have no federal laws protecting our faces. https://t.co/jvX9NIWYPuOctober 23, 2024

It's also worth noting that Meta itself decided to shut down its previous facial recognition system in 2021 over privacy concerns, promising to delete all the "faceprints" collected. Now, three years later, it's back on the agenda.

"We want to help protect people and their accounts," wrote Meta in its official announcement, "and while the adversarial nature of this space means we won’t always get it right, we believe that facial recognition technology can ​​help us be faster, more accurate, and more effective. We’ll continue to discuss our ongoing investments in this area with regulators, policymakers, and other experts."

We won’t always get it right – that's not very reassuring. So, something wrong is certain to happen at some point? If that's the case, no thanks, Meta, I don't trust you with my biometric data. I'd rather lose Facebook or Instagram account. What's the benefit of solving a problem to create an even bigger one?

What's certain is that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need to lose any sleep over EU fines over this for the time being. Meta's facial recognition tests aren't running globally. The company has excluded the UK and the EU markets. GDPR provides stringent privacy laws around personal information.

Elsewhere, Meta's testing will eventually show whether or not the new security feature is the right solution to the growing issue of social media scams, or whether it becomes yet another privacy nightmare. Well, in the name of my privacy, I'm not sure it's worth the trouble of finding out.

Western Digital recently split its business into two divisions: The WD brand, which now focuses exclusively on hard drives, and SanDisk, which manages the flash side, including SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives. While browsing SanDisk’s site, I noticed the Extreme Pro SDHC and SDXC UHS-I card is now available in a 2TB capacity, expanding the existing range, which previously topped out at 1TB.

This is great news for content creators and professionals, as the doubled capacity provides plenty of space for thousands of RAW photos or hours of 4K UHD video, and the card is fast too, making it ideal for demanding tasks like continuous burst photography and slow-motion video capture.

SanDisk claims the card offers read speeds of up to 250MB/s and write speeds of up to 150MB/s when used with the SanDisk QuickFlow SD UHS-I Card USB-A Reader (sold separately). QuickFlow first exceeded the UHS-I 104MB/s speed barrier in 2018, and SanDisk made further improvements to its technology in 2022 and again in 2024.

Reasonably priced

Living up to the Extreme part of its name, the card is engineered to withstand harsh temperatures, humidity, water, shocks, and even X-rays, ensuring reliable data protection in tough environments. It comes with a lifetime limited warranty, underscoring its durability, and buyers get access to RescuePRO Deluxe data recovery software for two years after purchase, to help restore accidentally deleted or corrupted files.

2TB of storage is enough to store up to 47,368 24MP RAW photos or over 2,800 minutes of 4K UHD video. Compatible with various devices, including DSLRs, mirrorless cameras, camcorders, and laptops, the SanDisk Extreme Ppro SD UHS-I card is priced lower than I would have expected, and you can buy it right now for $299.

if you want to pick up the SanDisk QuickFlow SD UHS-I Card USB-A Reader at the same time, that will cost you an additional $17.99. You can obviously use the 2TB card with other readers.

More from TechRadar Pro

• These are the largest microSD cards you can buy right now
• SanDisk takes over SSD, memory cards and flash drives from Western Digital
• WD launches enormous 4TB SD card for creative pros

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