From CNET: When discussing new smartphones, people may highlight the speed of the processor or the sharpness of the display. But the modem chip -- the thing that actually lets a smartphone make phone calls -- many times gets ignored.
Qualcomm, the world's largest smartphone-chip maker, is hoping it can change that situation, at least a little, by more clearly defining its modem chips, which are used to connect phones to cellular networks. The change should make it easier for consumers to figure out whether they're buying a phone with a top-end modem, which will provide a speedy connection for streaming movies and playing games, or a lower-end handset that offers slower download speeds.
The company -- whose Snapdragon chips are used in flagship phones from Samsung, Motorola, Sony and others -- said Wednesday it's introducing new classes for its modems, from X5 to X12, to let customers know the difference between their upload and download speeds. For example, the X12 will have peak speeds of 450 megabits per second for downloads, while the X5 will offer a slower 150Mbps. For future modem chips, the numbers will keep going higher, to -- say -- X13 or X15.
The tiered system is similar to how Qualcomm sets up its Snapdragon processors, which are the brains of a smartphone, used to run its display and applications. Those processors range from the top-end 800 line, to the mid-range 600 and 400 lines, down to the budget 200 line. Moving forward, what was once named, for instance, just the Snapdragon 810 -- a chip with both a processor and radio chip -- would now be named a Snapdragon 810 with an X10 LTE modem.
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