CES 2016: Qualcomm unveils LeTV Le Max Pro; features Snapdragon 820

Qualcomm has unveiled something big in the form of Le Max Pro smartphone at CES 2016. While the Le Max Pro is supposed to be a more powerful sibling of the Le Max, a phablet-sized smartphone, the device also happens to be first one to pack in Qualcomm’s much-awaited Snapdragon 820 chipset. The chipset that is based on 14nm FinFET fabrication process was announced back in November 2015 and packs in Qualcomm’s new Kyro cores that are said to deliver two times the performance of the currently available Snapdragon 810 chipset. The 820 chipset inside the LeTV Le Max Pro will also be the first processor 64-bit CPU that uses the ARMv8-A instruction set and the Qualcomm Hexagon 680 DSP that is used for offloading tasks that can be done faster and/or consume less power. The chip also supports LTE Category 12 with download speeds of up to 600 Mbps.

More impressively, this also happens to be the first chipset from Qualcomm to supports Qualcomm’s Sense ID ultrasonic fingerprint technology. Sense ID is both a software and hardware combined to deliver fingerprint readers that are more secure. More importantly, the new tech can supposedly read through surfaces like metal and glass reducing the need to have a visible, special area (like a circular ring) on a device. While the design of the LeTV Le Max Pro smartphone has not been confirmed, but one could expect it to come without a designated exposed fingerprint reader than Android users are currently used to. Sense ID with ultrasound technology is supposed to be quicker and more accurate at reading fingerprints compared to the current generation of capacitive fingerprint readers.