While all eyes are on Qualcomm for the impending release of devices containing their high-end Snapdragon 835 SoC, this morning the company has…
While all eyes are on Qualcomm for the impending release of devices containing their high-end Snapdragon 835 SoC, this morning the company has a slightly different kind of announcement to make. After nearly a decade since the launch of the Snapdragon brand, Qualcomm is undergoing a brand redesign of sorts ahead of their next-generation product launches. Starting today, Snapdragon is no longer a processor; instead Snapdragon is a platform.
More formally, Qualcomm will no longer be referring to Snapdragon as the “Snapdragon Processor”, but rather the “Qualcomm Snapdragon Mobile Platform”. Meanwhile at the bottom end of the product stack, the Snapdragon 200 series are getting ejected from the Snapdragon family entirely; they will now simply be part of the “Qualcomm Mobile Platform” family.
This rejiggering of brand names is, in all seriousness, exactly as weird as it sounds. But Qualcomm has some reasonably thought-out logic behind it.
In the US and abroad, Qualcomm has been promoting the Snapdragon brand in various forms for several years now, and they’ve actually had a fair bit of success at it. Snapdragon may not be a household name, but it’s likely to be better known than Qualcomm. So there is a certain degree of emphasis on making sure Qualcomm doesn’t get overtaken by their own brand name.
But the bigger shift here – and the real meat of the story – is from a processor to a platform. To be clear, the hardware isn’t changing; a Snapdragon SoC is still a Snapdragon SoC, and the Snapdragon brand continues to refer to the hardware and its supporting bits.
