LeTV teases first Snapdragon 820 powered smartphone

You may not have heard of LeTV, an up and coming smartphone manufacturer based in China, but the company has just been the first to tease a smartphone based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 SoC.

The company has only posted a picture up to its Hong Kong Facebook account, which doesn’t reveal anything else about the smartphone other than a short reference to the “820”. This is also a rather premature announcement, as the first Snapdragon 820 smartphones aren’t expected to make an appearance until early 2016. The teaser also doesn’t necessarily mean that LeTV will be the first to market with an 820 powered handset, but it’s interesting to note that a smaller brand has early access to Qualcomm’s processors.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 was made official last week, and will be arriving with a new high-end Adreno 530 GPU, which boasts 40 percent improvements to performance and energy consumption, along with a Spectra ISP with some new imaging features. The 820 is also set to be the first SoC to use Qualcomm’s own 64-bit ARMv8 based Kyro CPU core designs, rather than the reference Cortex-A57 and A53 cores found in its current chip generation. Qualcomm has been keeping details about its new CPU cores very close to its chest, but the company is apparently going back to a quad-core design, rather than producing another octa-core chip.

LeTV has been gaining some traction in China thanks to its small range of low cost, high-end smartphones. The company’s existing LeTV One Pro and One Max are based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processing package, but cost much less than flagship smartphones from HTCor Samsung. We will have to see if the new processor can restore Qualcomm’s shaken reputation after the overheating issues with its 810.

Are you waiting for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 to hit the market before making your next purchase?