Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders: Qualcomm Teams up with Asus for a Smartphone

In Summary

Qualcomm has announced a special-edition smartphone for its Snapdragon Insiders community, aptly called Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders.
Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 and runs on stock Android 11.
Additionally, the device also packs in additional accessories, such as a Quick Charger, protective case, braided cable, and most notably, ANC-enabled TWS earbuds.

Last month, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon Insiders Program: a worldwide community to bring Qualcomm fans together and offer them exclusive benefits, such as behind-the-scenes access, updates on the latest developments, and various Snapdragon product tips from experts to help them get the most out of their devices.

However, it’s been a little over a month since its inception, and Qualcomm already has a major announcement. It’s a special-edition smartphone, aptly called Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders, designed and manufactured by Asus.

Let’s dive in to take a closer look at the device.

Table of Contents

Design and Display

Starting with the appearance, the device features a design that’s reminiscent of the typical Asus-smartphone design. It comes with a rectangular camera module on the rear, arranged in a horizontal alignment, and a fingerprint scanner right below it for authentication. Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders comes in only one color: Midnight Blue.

Moving to the front, the device has a 6.78-inch display with a 144Hz refresh rate and up to 1200 nits of brightness. The display used here is an AMOLED panel from Samsung, and it’s both HDR10 and HDR10+ certified.

Performance

Under the hood, the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders runs on a Snapdragon 888, which is a 5nm octa-core chipset that offers up to 2.84GHz of clock speeds and an Adreno 660 GPU for handling graphics processing. It comes with a mammoth 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM and 512GB of UFS3.0 storage. And to power the internals, there is a 4000mAh battery with Quick Charge 5.0 support. Qualcomm says it’ll ship the device with a 65W charger globally and a 35W adapter in India.

In terms of connectivity options, there’s support for 5G, dual 4G, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, and NFC. For audio, Qualcomm has equipped the device with dual stereo speakers, a smart AMP, and quad HDR microphones to elevate the audio experience.

On the software front, the smartphone runs on stock Android 11 out of the box.

Camera

Moving on to the camera department, the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders sports a triple-camera setup on the rear, which includes a 64MP (Sony IMX686) primary sensor with an f/1.8 aperture, accompanied by a 12MP ultra-wide angle (Sony IMX363) sensor and an 8MP telephone lens with up to 12x zoom. On the front, it comes equipped with a single, 24MP camera.

As for video shooting capabilities, the device can record 8K video at 30fps, 4K at 30/60fps, and 1080p at 30/60fps with the rear cameras.

Additional Accessories

Qualcomm is bundling a bunch of accessories with the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders. So in addition to the device and the Quick Charger, users also get a custom rubber bumper, a braided USB-C to USB-C cable, and a pair of ANC-enabled true wireless earphones.

The earphones are developed by Master & Dynamic in collaboration with Qualcomm and powered by the Snapdragon Sound technology. They claim to offer quick connectivity with ultra-low Bluetooth latency, and most notably, true high-res (24-bit 96kHz) audio.