Qualcomm outs Snapdragon 210, an LTE-on-budget-SoC to counter the MT6290

Unlike earlier, LTE and high-end don’t exactly go hand in hand these days. LTE on flagship, and even mid-range phones is more a necessity than luxury these days; as it turns out, it’s not just the mid-range phones that will get the LTE treatment this year.

Qualcomm is regarded as one of the best SoC makers around. If you take a look, most flagships from around the world will have none but a Snapdragon processor, which as you’re aware is a line of SoCs from Qualcomm.

The company has now unveiled the Snapdragon 208 and Snapdragon 210 SoCs.  The Snapdragon 210 aims to bring LTE to budget phones, and has an Adreno 300 series GPU. Since a lot of entry-level phones come with dual SIM, the chipset will offer support for dual SIM LTE as well. It can playback 1080p video, and supports hardware as follows: upto 8 mega-pixel cameras and 1280 x 720p HD displays. The Snapdragon 208 doesn’t come with 4G LTE, but has a dual-core CPU and support for up to 960 x 540 pixel displays.

MediaTek’s MT6290 has been the LTE chip of choice for many manufacturers

MediaTek has been pushing on Qualcomm with the new MT6290 LTE chip that’s featured on a lot of phones lately. The Snapdragon 210 could well be a response to that.