David Court

The smartphone industry is a bit odd. It’s one of the few industries where devices are getting bigger and prices are going up. It’s pretty much the opposite of Moore’s law.

It is also one of the few areas of tech where the logo on the back is often a device’s most notable point of difference.

This is because the majority of Android smartphones – Samsung, Google, HTC, LG, ZTE, Nokia, ASUS, Motorola, OPPO, OnePlus and Xiaomi – all rely on the same company for their smartphone’s chipset.

That company is Qualcomm. And this week, at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm revealed its latest mobile chip, the Snapdragon 855.

This is a significant moment for the industry as Snapdragon chips hold the

Store twice as many photos and videos per GB: For me, this is the most exciting new feature. And a bit mind-blowing. The Snapdragon 855 brings with it a feature called HEIF: An incredibly unsexy acronym that stands for High-Efficiency Image Format.

This new format compresses an image so that it takes up roughly half the space of a current jpeg, thus allowing you to store twice as many photos.

But it’s more than that. HEIF will also serve as a new media container, allowing you to keep a variety of images – a standard still, burst mode, raw file and depth-of-field image – in its format. Rating: 10/10

Portrait video mode: This feature, also awfully-named, refers to a camera’s depth-of-field ability rather than its portrait/landscape

45 per cent faster CPU and 20 per cent faster graphics: Mobile gamers 10/10