Citing features like an immersive camera experience, Gigabit LTE connectivity, as well as immersive multimedia experiences like eXtended reality (XR) and on-device artificial intelligence (AI), Qualcomm put a spotlight on some of its Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform key technologies.

The front and rear cameras use Qualcomm's new Spectra 280 ISP for rich color gamut while the Adreno 630 GPU brings innovations for new XR designs, like the Samsung Gear VR for Galaxy S9/S9+, including room-scale six degrees of freedom (6DoF) with simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and “Adreno foveation”, which bring lower power consumption and improved XR application performance.

Qualcomm was also quite keen to talk about its 2nd generation Gigabit LTE solution, the Snapdragon x20 LTE modem, which provides LTE Category 18 peak download speeds of 1.2 Gbps, up to 5x carrier aggregation, License Assisted Access (LAA), Dual SIM-Dual VoLTE as well as 4x4 MIMO on up to 3 aggregated carriers.

“We are proud to have recently expanded our strategic relationship with Samsung to continue our joint efforts to bring breakthrough mobile experiences to consumers with the new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+”, said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager, mobile, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “Powered by the Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform, the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ is designed to deliver the latest advancements directly to consumers.”

“Samsung is built on a heritage of delivering meaningful innovations and is driven by a commitment to defying barriers”, said TM Roh, executive vice president and the head of mobile R&D, Samsung Electronics. “The Galaxy S9 is built for the way we use our smartphones to communicate and share experiences today, supported by our continuous pursuit for the latest technology with Qualcomm Technologies.”

In case you missed it, the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ will be equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 SoC in China and the US, while Galaxy S9 and S9+ in Europe and the rest of the world will use Samsung's own Exynos 9810 SoC. Both chipsets are built on 10nm FinFET manufacturing process and are based on octa-core CPU design with custom cores, but feature different GPUs, ARM Mali-G71 MP18 for the Exynos 9810 and Adreno 630 for the Snapdragon 845.

There have already been a couple of benchmark results but it appears that devices at the MWC 2018 Unpacked event were running on custom firmware so there are a lot of unanswered questions. Hopefully, we will get more details once these smartphones start shipping.