I personally can’t wait to play with the BlackBerry Passport, but even before I touch it I can’t help but think that the Canadian company should’ve opted for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 rather than Snapdragon 800 chip. The S801 is part of the same family of chips with slightly faster cores and improved GPU. With Snapdragon 801, BlackBerry would’ve created a more future-proof device that would keep performance for longer times.
When Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 801, it said the following:
Any design intended for the Snapdragon 800 should be able to use the 801 without any extra work. It’s got four CPU cores based on the 32-bit Krait 400 architecture, an Adreno 330 GPU, integrated 150Mbps LTE and 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and the same variant of TSMC’s 28nm process. Qualcomm has also added eMMC 5.0 support, which should boost maximum storage performance compared to the 800’s eMMC 4.5.
In other words, a little to no extra work is required to use Snapdragon 801 instead of Snapdragon 800, yet the performance gains are visible.
That being said, I’ve no doubts that even the Snapdragon 800-powered Passport will be super-fast. Alas, it would be better if it was Snapdragon 801 ticking under the hood. Said chip is powering most of today’s top phones, including the HTC One M8, Samsung Galaxy S5, LG G3 and Sony Xperia Z2. Moreover, we expect a new series of devices rocking the Snapdragon 805 to hit the stores within few weeks, and before you know it, the Passport’s specs sheet will look outdated. That’s kinda said, when you think about it, no matter how “pure specs” are irrelevant for the user experience…
So what do you think? Do you think it’s sad that BlackBerry opted for Snapdragon 800 instead of Snapdragon 801?