Samsung Galaxy Note III to feature Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset: Report

According to a report by ZDNet Korea, the Korean smartphone giant is likely to dump its own Exynos octa-core chip that it has used in some variants of the Galaxy S4, in favour of Snapdragon 800 chipset.

Qualcomm had introduced the Snapdragon 800 chipset at CES in January. The chip targets top-end smartphones and has 75 percent more horsepower than Qualcomm's old fastest model, enough to record and playback Ultra HD video as per the company. However, as per Qualcomm's own benchmarks, it doesn't consume more power so battery life is not an issue. The chip also offers built-in support for LTE unlike Samsung's own chipset. So the company won't need additional hardware to enable support for 4G connectivity.

It might be possible that Samsung's chipset production facility is not equipped to produce the Exynos chip in mass capacity or the cost is not feasible.

The Snapdragon 800 chipset has a quad-core Krait 400 processor that supports clock speeds of up to 2.3GHz. The phone supports Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4/5 GHz), GSM (GPRS, EDGE), W-CDMA/UMTS (HSDPA, HSUPA, HSPA+, DC-HSPA+ cat.29), MBMS, LTE cat.4, CDMA2000 connectivity options. Other phones that are reportedly using the same chip include LG D801, Xiaomi Mi 3, Sony Xperia Honami and ZTE Grand Memo V9815.

Previous reports suggested that the Samsung Galaxy Note III would be powered by an Exynos 5 Octa-core processor, Mali 450 GPU with 8 cores and have 3 GB of RAM. It's also rumoured to feature a 13-megapixel rear camera. It might also feature a 6-inch display. It was also reported that the Galaxy Note III will run the latest version of the Android, which will most likely be Android 4.3 along with a layer of Samsung'sTouch-Wiz interface.