Qualcomm’s Latest Innovation: Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 Transforms the Budget Phone Market

Qualcomm makes a wide range of chips belonging to the Snapdragon lineup. Some of those chips are meant to go into flagship phones , while others will instead go into budget phones . For the latter category, Qualcomm has a brand-new chip for you to check out: the Snapdragon 4 Gen 2.

The Snapdragon 4 Gen 2 will be Qualcomm’s new chip for budget phones released in the second half of 2023 and the first half of 2024, and it’s looking really good. For starters, it’s the very first chip in the 4-series fabricated in a 4nm process, ensuring it’s as efficient as possible. It comes with an eight-core CPU with two cores that can go as high as 2.2 GHz and six efficiency ones going up to 2 GHz.

It also has an ISP that supports photo capturing at up to 108MP. Video recording seems to be more of a letdown, supporting only 1080p video recording at up to 60 fps, but given this is a part that’s meant to go on cheaper phones, it can be excused. It does support displays at up to 120Hz, however, as well as ultra-fast charging thanks to support for Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4+.

It’s a chip that’s meant to get the basics right and give you a smartphone that performs well at the fraction of the cost of a flagship, and seeing that, it seems to get the job done. Smartphones with this SoC should begin popping up within the next few months. Keep in mind that not all smartphones might get all the features we mentioned here — these are the top specs allowed by the chip, and the actual specs will vary depending on the phone.