One month in as my daily driver phone, the OnePlus 15 has proven itself to be less about flash and more about getting the fundamentals right. It’s a device that doesn’t try to break out with clever design hooks or gimmick software features. Instead, it focuses on the things phone shoppers actually feel every day: endurance, responsiveness, and a sense of consistency that some modern flagships ironically sometimes miss.

The company unveiled two flagship processors, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for smartphones and the Snapdragon X2 Elite for PCs—that not only push performance and efficiency forward but will also hopefully serve as the foundation for a new class of AI-fueled personal agents.

Qualcomm AI engines and silicon solutions are powering more and more devices out on the connected, intelligent edge.

Wireless headsets and glasses are the better path to the metaverse to implement augmented reality, virtual reality or XR (Extended Reality) the right way. But wireless virtual realities are not easy problems to solve.

Qualcomm gave me a new perspective on freedom last week at its 5G Summit in San Diego, with its new Wireless AR Smart Viewer reference design glasses. And just like the many vistas in that sunny California town, the view was quite nice.

Based on the Wi-Fi 7 standard, Qualcomm’s FastConnect 7800 will deliver peak speeds of 5.8Gbps and sub-2 millisecond latency, with High Band Simultaneous (HBS) Multi-Link technology for link aggregation, and a huge performance lift at half the latency of previous generation WiFi-6/6E solutions.

In detailed briefings with Qualcomm, I learned about the company’s next generation Snapdragon mobile platform that’s manufactured on a cutting-edge 5nm semiconductor fab process, and it sounds impressive to be sure. Let’s step through a few of the particulars…

All of these partners have revealed plans to commercialize XR Viewers to provide immersive, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) experiences over 5G networks.

Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman recently said, “The phone is already dead -- people just haven’t realized.” He made this statement while discussing Microsoft’s HoloLens and potential future iterations of similar mixed-reality devices, which could be eventually be integrated into our daily lives much like the smartphone is today.