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Leaked images and OnePlus's own Weibo posts reveal the upcoming OnePlus 16 will closely resemble the OnePlus 15, with a new glowing orange LED light array on its back panel. Aside from an expected Snapdragon chip upgrade and tweaked cameras, the phone appears to offer few other significant changes ahead of its release in the coming weeks.
Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2, its first audio chip with micro-power Wi-Fi 6E built directly into the silicon, allowing earbuds to connect to home networks without a separate Wi-Fi chip. The company says the chip is 30 percent smaller, uses up to 40 percent less power, and doubles AI processing versus its predecessor. Qualcomm has named HP, Bose, and Cleer as partners, including camera-equipped earbuds with Cleer.
PrismML, an AI lab founded by Caltech researchers and advised by UC Berkeley's Ion Stoica, unveiled a version of its 1-bit Bonsai language model built for Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 platform, shown at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit. The 2-billion-parameter model is tuned to handle vision and language tasks locally on smart glasses, letting wearers query what they see in real time. No specific glasses using the model have been announced yet.
At Snapdragon Summit 2026, Microsoft's Brett Ostrum announced updated 12-inch Surface Pro and 13-inch Surface Laptop models powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite X2 processors, extending a chip already used in larger Surface devices. The refreshed machines also get higher RAM ceilings of 16GB and 24GB, up from 8GB and 16GB previously.
Microsoft is refreshing its smaller Surface Pro and Surface Laptop with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Plus chip, launching October 13. The devices keep last year's design but get 16GB minimum RAM (up from 8GB), brighter screens, and modest battery life gains. Starting prices jump to $1,149.99 for the Surface Pro and $1,199.99 for the Surface Laptop, up from $799.99 and $899.99 respectively.
Xiaomi unveiled its 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max phones in China, among the first devices to run Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 chipset, with the Pro Max using the higher-end variant. Both phones feature privacy screens that limit off-angle viewing, LTPO AMOLED displays up to 6.9 inches with 4,000 nits peak brightness, the same triple rear camera setup as before, and larger batteries of 7,000mAh and 8,500mAh respectively.
Qualcomm has introduced the Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2, a chip aimed at powering next-generation earbuds, headphones and audio glasses with on-device AI. The company says it doubles the AI processing capability of its predecessor, the Snapdragon S7 Gen 1 Sound Platform, and supports features like real-time translation and sound amplification for hearing-impaired users. The chip also includes aptX Lossless audio support, Qualcomm's XPAN wireless technology, and Wi-Fi 6E connectivity.
Qualcomm announced that its Snapdragon X2 Series processors, which include an NPU capable of 80 trillion operations per second, will gain official Linux support. The company is upstreaming core drivers, including for the Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU, starting with Debian by the end of this year and Ubuntu certification targeted for the first half of 2027 through a partnership with Canonical. Partners HP, ASUS and HUMAIN are also planning Linux-supported devices in early 2027, with current work validated on a Debian 13 'Trixie' environment.
Android Authority ran Geekbench 6 tests on a reference phone powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chip, built on TSMC's 2nm process with prime CPU cores clocked up to 5GHz. Single-core performance rose about 10% over last year's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, while multi-core gains were minimal at roughly 1.5% despite efficiency cores jumping to 4GHz.
Microsoft unveiled a redesigned Surface Mouse at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, nearly a decade after the original launched in 2016. The new model adds haptic feedback, a customizable Action Button that defaults to launching Copilot, Bluetooth 6.0 multi-device support, and a battery Microsoft says lasts up to six months. It arrives October 13 in Black and Platinum for $79.99, alongside new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices.
GrapheneOS confirmed on X that Motorola's newly unveiled Signature 27 will be the first phone supported under its partnership with Motorola, ending years of Pixel-only availability. The project said official details on rollout timing and preinstallation are still pending.
Xiaomi unveiled the Xiaomi 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max in Beijing, making it the first manufacturer to ship phones with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 and 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 chips. Both models retain a secondary rear OLED display next to the camera module, which shows notifications and widgets and lets users take selfies with the higher-quality rear cameras. The phones launch first in China, with a global rollout planned before the end of 2026, though Xiaomi devices continue to bypass the US market.