Summary
- MediaTek’s new Dimensity 7300 will offer solid specs like 200MP camera support and 3Gbps downlink speeds.
- The real game-changer is the Dimensity 7300X with built-in support for dual displays.
- This could lead to more affordable foldable phones hitting the market, potentially under $500 in the future.
If you’re the kind of smartphone user that cares about specs and prices (but not so much custom ROMS) you’ve probably been very happy with the latest MediaTek Dimensity SoCs that are shipping in phones. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips still very much rule the world of high-end smartphones, but MediaTek has been steadily catching up, snapping up more and more of Qualcomm’s market share to the point where it ships more smartphone SoCs than any other vendor. Not content to sit on its laurels, MediaTek has announced a new pair of processors, one of which might shake up the market a bit when it starts showing up on shelves.
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What’s on the silicon
The chips in question are the Dimensity 7300 and Dimensity 7300X. The pair of chips are basically the same except for one important difference (which I’ll get to in a minute). Both have 2.5GHz octa-core processors that can support either LPDDR4x or LPDDR5 memory. Both support up to 5G calling with downlink speeds of over 3Gbps, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.4. The 7300 chips will be able to support camera sensors up to 200MP, have built in noise reduction and face detection, and be able to record video at up to 4K and 30fps.
Those aren’t the best numbers on the market, but they’re not bad. So what’s so special about the 7300X? It has built in support for dual display foldable phones. That may not sound like a huge deal (there are lots of foldable phones on the market, after all) but this could signal an upcoming boost in quality to mid-range foldables, possibly even some new entries to the field with lower prices than their high-end counterparts. When people talk about affordable foldables, they usually mean less than $1,000; but consider that the Nothing Phone 2a costs around $350 and runs on the very similar Dimensity 7200. Could we be entering the age of $500 foldables? I don’t know, I’m just asking questions.
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MediaTek has a lot more information on its site if you want to sift through the PR copy, but the gist of it is there’s a new set of mid-range chips in town, and we could be in for interesting times ahead. If my rampant speculation has left you hungry for a new phone, there are a few foldables I’d like to recommend.
