Will this finally kill the overwhelmingly high numbers of Helio G99 phones in the market?
MediaTek has announced a new chipset without much fanfare. We haven’t even received a press release for this one. Well, because it’s essentially the lower-end variant of the Helio G99 with the performance and build of the Helio G88. It must have just been a “passing-through” chipset so there is more variety in the lower end. What’s different about the Helio G91 is that it supports 108MP cameras natively. And it still uses the same 12nm process as the Helio G88.
As the chip is essentially a rebranded Helio G85 or G88, it uses the same CPU and GPU configuration. There are 2x Cortex-A75 chips here clocked at 2GHz and 6x Cortex-A55 clocked at 1.8GHz. Its GPU is the Arm Mali-G52 MC2, no surprise. Despite this, it has a big advantage over the Helio G85 or G88. It’s newer so it will get more support from MediaTek while having essentially the same performance.
The chipset was first seen on Itel’s newest budget phone, the Itel S24. There’s also not a lot of fanfare with this device although there are a few leaks of it already. As you can see from the snapshot above, the phone flaunts, among other things, a 6.6″ 90Hz IPS LCD and 8GB RAM (+8GB virtual) and 256GB ROM. The most disappointing part of this phone is the storage type, it’s the dated eMMC 5.1 wherein UFS 2.2 should have been the standard for any phone at 2024. This means slower read and write speeds so if you download a heavy app here and install the updates, it might be slower than usual. Copying files here will also take a while.
The phone also has a punch hole, which is certainly a good thing. This punch hole serves as the home for the 8MP selfie camera. Taking advantage of the Helio G91’s 108MP support, this phone is equipped with it, making this type of sensor much more available in budget-oriented smartphones, instead of being forever stuck at 50MP. However, we will repeat this time and time again, megapixels do not accurately measure photo quality.
Finally, the Itel S24 is said to have a 5000mAh battery with 18W fast charging, though its real specs are yet to be announced. Finally, the phone has a side-mounted fingerprint scanner, 4G LTE, NFC, Bluetooth 5.1, and dual-band Wi-Fi, carryovers from the Helio G85 and G88.