This means flip phones (or clamshell foldable phones) are going to be mainstream!
MediaTek is always up for a new chipset every few months or so. When they find a market they can penetrate, sure as hell they will do it. The target? Clamshell foldable phones! Picture this, you’re in the early 2000s or maybe sometime in your college years in 2006 and you just got that tacky Motorola Razr everyone is talking about and suddenly you’re the coolest (and probably richest) kid in the block.
Flip phones came in many forms but their main gimmick was that they… well, flip. Some had a small screen at the cover and when you flip it open, it made a cool clicking sound effect. These phones mainly disappeared after the iPhone launched in 2007, with Android phones following suit. Suddenly, users wanted a phone that is a “do-it-all” device with a touch screen. However, thanks to recent developments in folding screen technology, clamshell phones are about to make an epic comeback and rightfully so.
Initially, these clamshell phones, like the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip, were a tad too expensive, starting at a sub-60K price point. However, over time, many brands joined in and found the perfect formula and started to release phones that are more affordable for mainstream markets. Tecno launched their flip phone at a sub-30K price point and ZTE even joined in
The affordable flip phones have varying chipsets, some going as low as the MediaTek Helio G99, like the Blackview Hero 10. However, it seems like the company is planning to penetrate this market by releasing a new chipset designed specifically for flip phones. Thus, the MediaTek Dimensity 7300x was born. It was carved out of the MediaTek Dimensity 7300.
The chipset is essentially a small restructuring of the Dimensity 8200. Instead of a 4/3/1 setup, the 7300 and 7300x uses a more traditional 4/4 setup consisting of a Cortex-A78 main cores clocked at 2.5GHz and Cortex-A55 efficiency cores with no mentioned clock speeds. However, it is most likely 2GHz. It is manufactured on the same 4nm TSMC process as the 8200 but features a different GPU, the Mali-G615 MC2. The Dimensity 8200 uses an ARM Mali-G610 MP6. With 6 cores, the GPU on the 8200 is more powerful.
In terms of specs, the Dimensity 7300 and 7300x are identical. No difference here except that the Dimensity 7300x has better support for folding screens, such as the aforementioned clamshell devices. Prepare, techies! Midrange clamshell phones are soon going to be the norm.
As always, we can’t leave the fancy “AI” jargons behind. The chipset uses a MediaTek APU 655 for AI processing. And as for display support, it’s the MiraVision 955. Which means support for displays of up to WQHD+, 10-bit color, and HDR/HDR10+.
For imaging, the Image Signal Processing (ISP) used here is the Imagiq 950. This means support for cameras of up to 200MP and is said to be an improved version of what the Dimensity 7050 has. According to MediaTek, the focusing speed of the new ISP is 1.5x faster than the Dimensity 7050.
And finally, sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G is supported alongside Bluetooth 5.3 and tri-band Wi-Fi 6/6e connectivity.
MediaTek didn’t say when will the chipset arrive, or which handset. But we bet it’s going to be either realme, Xiaomi, OnePlus, or any of Transsion’s brands (Tecno, Itel, Infinix). And as for the Dimensity 7300x for flip phones, there’s no word either.
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