Qualcomm has unveiled its latest chipset that will power a wealth of mid-range phones starting later this month. Redmi and Realme are among the brands that will use the Snapdragon 7 Gen 2 chipset. As you might expect, the chipset isn't quite as powerful as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, but it appears to offer a notable upgrade over the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. Qualcomm says the CPU will deliver a performance improvement of over 50 percent, with speeds of up to 2.91GHz. The company claims the Snapdragon 7 Gen 2 will offer improvements in GPU performance (by two times) and power efficiency (by 13 percent) as well. Moreover, Qualcomm says that "on-device AI is integrated across the entire platform."

If you can do without all the beefed-up chips, six-pack cameras, and lidars of the $1,000 handsets, mid-range options get the job done for not a lot of cash. Sometimes you even get more from the cheaper phones, like an actual headphone jack. This week, Motorola and OnePlus announced some new phones that fall into that group. Lenovo-owned Moto has two new options. The Moto G 5G is the most basic.

Expensive flagship phones won't be the only way for you to play with advanced features like AR Emoji, Animoji and Face ID much longer. Qualcomm is making it easier for companies to create mid-range smartphones that pack those functions by launching a new mobile processor. The Snapdragon 710 will come with a multi-core AI Engine and support neural network processing, as well as image signal processors and graphics units that are typically found in higher-end chipsets. The 710 is the first of the 700-series, which was announced at MWC this year, and will sit above options like the 600- and 400-ranges but below top-tier chips like the Snapdragon 845. The Snapdragon 710 is a 10nm chipset that features a multi-core AR engine for on-device neural networking processing, as well as a Spectra 250 image signal processor that enables things like multi-frame noise reduction and AI camera features like video style transfer and active depth sensing for artificial bokeh.