Enlarge / Sony's automotive ambitions crystallized at CES 2023 with the debut of Afeela, a new mobility brand being developed together with Honda. (credit: Sony)

One of the more intriguing stories to have emerged from the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas over the past few years has been Sony's electric vehicle. The Japanese tech giant stunned people in 2020 when it debuted the Vision-S, a handsome EV designed to showcase Sony's sensors and camera tech on the outside and its entertainment portfolio on the inside.

The following year brought more developed prototypes of the Vision-S into view; then, in 2022, it took an SUV version to CES as well. At that time Sony told the media it was exploring commercial possibilities for a Sony EV, and last March it announced a strategic alliance with Honda, with the latter providing vehicle body engineering and after-sales support, and Sony providing the electronics, sensors, networking, telecom, and infotainment.

For CES 2023, Sony's automotive ambitions have become a lot clearer. Sony Honda Mobility, the joint venture, is launching a brand called Afeela, which it says is because "feel" is "at the center of the mobility experience," as people feel "mobility as an intelligent entity" and mobility feels "people and society using sensing and network IT technologies."

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  Clone the iPhone? Xiaomi? Never! [credit: Xiaomi ]

It's still only 2022, but that's not stopping Android manufacturers from launching their big flagship phones that will sell for the majority of next year. After Vivo's launch last month, the new OEM to launch a phone with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC is Xiaomi, simply named Xiaomi 13 and Xiaomi 13 Pro. These two models represent big (6.73-inch) and small (6.36-inch) phones with different designs.

The smaller phone is more interesting because—hey look, it's an iPhone! Xiaomi is fond of copying Apple , and with the flat-sided perimeter band and square camera block, it's hard to see the Xiaomi 13 as anything other than an iPhone. It looks much better than the curved-sided Xiaomi 13 Pro, but that's just because the iPhone's flat sides also look good. (I remain shocked that no Android OEM has copied the dynamic island yet.) The bigger "Pro" model is more of a generic Samsung-style design with curved screen edges and a beveled ring around the phone. The one Pro-model design flourish is swapping out the glass back panel for ceramic.

Both phones get the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. This is a 4 nm chip with an ARM Cortex X3, two Cortex A715 CPUs, two Cortex A710 CPUs, and three Cortex A510 CPUs. Like we talked about during the chip's launch , this mix of four different core designs is a weird, non-standard layout designed to extend 32-bit support for another year. ARM wants to kill 32-bit, but Qualcomm and Android aren't ready yet.

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  It apparently took "Xtreme Imagination" to design the Vivo X90. [credit: Vivo ]

The world's first smartphone with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC is the Vivo X90 Pro Plus. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will power most of the flagship Android phones coming out in 2023, but BBK's Vivo is beating everyone to the punch and releasing before the new year. The phone is coming out in China on December 6 for 6,499 CNY (about $910).

For specs, there's a 6.78-inch, 3200×1440, 120HZ OLED display, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a 4700 mAh battery with an 80 W fast charger, and a rare signing of Qualcomm's super-sized 3D Sonic Max in-display fingerprint sensor. The cameras are also really big, with Sony's 1-inch IMX989 sensor leading the way, along with a 50MP portrait camera, a 48MP ultrawide, and a 64MP 3.5x telephoto.

As for fun new things the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 enables, that storage is UFS 4.0 , a new, faster flash storage standard that can hit read speeds of 4,200MBps and write speeds of 2,800MBps (though there's no benchmark on this phone yet). We were looking forward to Wi-Fi 7 support, but this phone only supports Wi-Fi 6. It's hard to tell what's going on with the Chinese-language spec sheet , but it should have AV1 support.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Today, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, the company's flagship chip that will be coming to many Android phones over the next few months. Besides the usual newer, better, hopefully faster cores, a big piece of news is the addition of Wi-Fi 7 support so you can get better home wireless—provided you invest in a new router.

Qualcomm has some claims for this new chip. The company says the CPU "improves performance up to 35 percent" and has "up to 40 percent more power efficiency." The GPU supposedly "delivers up to 25 percent faster performance, with up to 45 percent better power efficiency." Take both of these claims with a grain of salt, since Qualcomm last year promised a 20 percent CPU improvement that never manifested in shipping products. Even if Qualcomm hits these performance promises, it would still be about a year behind the iPhone. The company is trying to do something about its uncompetitive performance with the ( now legally encumbered ) Nuvia acquisition , but those chips aren't ready yet.

Let's start with the basics. This is a 4 nm chip with an unusual layout containing four different CPU cores, all designed by Arm. The prime core is a 3.2 GHz Arm Cortex X3—that's all good and expected, and from here, Arm's recommended layout is three Cortex A710 CPUs for "medium" duty and four A510 CPUs for low-power background processing. Qualcomm isn't following the recommended layout, though, and after the Cortex X3 it has two different cores doing "medium" duty: a pair of Cortex-A715 CPUs and a pair of last-generation Cortex-A710 CPUs. After that, there are only three—not the expected four—Cortex A510 CPUs doing background duty.