The year’s not nearly over, but 2026 has already delivered a glut of exciting Android phones. Still, we can’t help but think about what might come next. Every phone-maker has distinct ideas about what features they’d like to add and improve with every generation. Some of these things, like design, they can do alone, but others require close collaboration with their partners.
Two such partners are Google and Qualcomm – the former on the software side and the latter on the hardware side. Every summer at Google I/O, we learn about a slew of new software features that will enhance existing and upcoming Android phones. Then, every fall, Qualcomm, which makes the chips, gives us a glimpse of what power and features those companies, like Samsung and Motorola, will have to play with in upcoming releases.
On Tuesday at its Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm announced a pair of powerful new chips – the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6.
“We’re just now at the beginning of the agentic age, and Snapdragon is the platform built for it,” added Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, in his Snapdragon Summit keynote.
Of the new dual chips, it’s the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 that will really take phones to the next level of performance and AI capabilities. The chip “represents the pinnacle of Snapdragon innovation, purpose-built for the most advanced AI workloads and the experiences that will define the agentic era,” said Qualcomm product marketing manager Charlie Beeman in a briefing ahead of the announcement.
The Extreme sees inevitable improvements to speed, connectivity and efficiency, but more interesting are the tweaks Qualcomm has made to enable new experiences and features that it simply wasn’t possible to include on prior Android phones.
“It brings an enormous amount of compute power to a smartphone, and therefore opens up a lot of new opportunities in terms of the applications that could be developed,” said Ben Wood, chief analyst at FDM CCS. “But it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation because until that’s enabled on the phones, we won’t know what those applications are going to be.”
A question mark lingers over how different phone-makers will tap the power of the Elite Extreme, but Qualcomm has given us some distinct areas where we can expect to see new experiences. Here are three to look out for and look forward to.
Camera
“How’s the camera?” is pretty much the first question everyone will ask when coming across a new smartphone in the wild. Phone-makers know that image quality and camera capabilities are priorities for any new device, and while a lot of that comes down to choices made by the manufacturer, Qualcomm chips still run the show when it comes to the phone’s imaging pipeline.
Both of the new Snapdragon chips will enable a refined camera experience with intelligent stabilization and every pixel now carrying 16 bits of data. The image signaling processor is also tightly coupled to the NPU, a specialized chip that accelerates AI and machine learning tasks. This will enable AI to work on an image while it’s being captured, instead of after. This allows for a dramatic leap in raw throughput and professional-grade video, and a far deeper understanding of every pixel in your scene.
“Each element of the scene is processed individually, helping ensure every shot looks natural, consistent, and remarkably true to life,” said Lekha Motiwala, Qualcomm’s senior director of product management, speaking at Snapdragon Summit.
And the Extreme version of the chip offers more capabilities, such as enabling phone cameras to record video in 8K resolution at 60 fps or film in 4K resolution at 240 fps for super-slow-mo footage.
“You’ll see this coming for the first time in Snapdragon-powered smartphones,” said Motiwala. “It’s not just about getting a shot. It’s about preserving a moment as you experienced it.”
Personalized AI
There’s simply no way for AI to be personal without it really getting to know you. Agentic AI that lacks personal context – past, present and future – would be like speaking with a different stranger each time you pick up your phone.
The 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 is engineered to collect that context, hold onto it and draw from it whenever needed. This is all thanks to Qualcomm’s new Sensing Hub, which, with its dual micro-NPUs, can support models up to 200 million parameters. The company’s updated Personal Scribe can then remember who said what, why it matters and learn from your messages, emails and conversations to build your private knowledge graph.
It could expand an AI agent’s ability to give you nuanced answers to questions, help you recall when and to whom you made specific promises, and make future plans for you based on a whole range of factors, such as your availability, schedule, travel preferences and need for relaxation or concentrated working time.
With its ability to run over 30 billion different models on device, the Elite Extreme Gen 6 is definitely leading the way when it comes to running agentic AI. “When you have this level of capability, your work starts before you even open your inbox,” said Amon. “Here, an agent digests your [Snapdragon] Summit invitation, understands the dates, the flights, the venue details, key moments inside it, and it builds a plan.”
Gaming
Phones can be overlooked as gaming devices, but for Qualcomm, providing a best-in-class mobile gaming experience remains a priority.
With the 8 Elite Extreme Gen 2, the company is introducing an AI-rendering technology called Adreno Neural Fusion, which is supported across major game engines, including Unreal, Unity and Messiah. It can deliver upscaled images with “rock-solid frame rates” at lower power manager of product marketing at Qualcomm
Adreno Neural Fusion is “a proprietary technology designed by Qualcomm from the ground up, not an off-the-shelf implementation,” said Chris Patrick, Qualcomm’s SVP and general manager of handsets. “It’s a tightly integrated architecture that brings graphics and AI together to knock a new class of intelligent gaming experiences.”
In addition, AI-dedicated Adreno matrix cores run advanced models, and the chip features 18MB of high-performance memory. So what does this mean for your mobile gaming experience? The answer is better picture quality, higher frame rates and longer play times with games drawing less power than in the past. It’s a win-win-win.
Editor’s note: Katie Collins’ travel costs for the Snapdragon Summit were covered by Qualcomm. The judgments and opinions of CNET are our own.
