Week 29 in review: Snapdragon 855 Plus and Exynos 9825 flex their muscle

Welcome to your very own digest of the bigger tech stories of the past week.

Xiaomi took the wraps off a long-expected Mi A3. The Android One device is the first in its line to carry an AMOLED screen, which coupled with a Snapdragon 665 chipset and stock Android makes for a good proposition at €250. Then again, its resolution is 720p, so maybe not - you can share your thoughts here.

Xiaomi also launched the Redmi K20 and Redmi K20 Pro in India - both will go on sale locally from July 22.

Qualcomm announced its flagship chipset for the second half of the year - the Snapdragon 855 Plus. While sharing the same arcitecture as the non-plus version, the SD855+ promises a 4% faster CPU and 15% faster GPU thanks to higher clock speeds.

Asus was eager to point out that its ROG Phone II will be the first with the Snapdragon 855 Plus - we saw both live images of the highly-anticipated gaming phone and a Geekbench score of its chipset, which indeed posted a slightly better score than its SD855-powered peers.

In related news, Samsung's answer to the Snapdragon 855 Plus - the 7nm Exynos 9825 that will premiere in the Galaxy Note10 early next month - also appeared on Geekbench. It recorded a higher single-core result than its Qualcomm rival but a lower multi-core one.

As usual the Galaxy Note10 was the reason for a lot of chatter during the week. First for its camera - the Note10 will reportedly be the last Samsung flagship to carry the popular 12MP 1/2.55 1.4μm camera (that's been around for years) - and second for a rumor that all Chinese Galaxy Note10+ units will have 5G, 12GB of RAM and at least 512GB of storage.

In one final Samsung-related story we saw the Galaxy Tab S6 in new press renders. It's expected to join the Galaxy Note10 at its August 7 event.

This week hosted Amazon's Prime Day and for two days straight the internet was alight with tech deals. Some of us came out mostly unscathed but other's, tragically, lost half their wallet's girth. Well, who doesn't love a good tech unboxing.

If 2019 was the year of the 48MP camera, 2020 may be the year of the 108MP one, says Twitter tipster IceUniverse. According to his rumor 10x optical zoom cameras will be all the rage in 2020 as well.

The Sony Xperia 1R may have a whopping 5K screen! That's 5040x2160px compared to the Xperia 1's 1644x3840px or 70% more pixels.

Amazfit unveiled the GTR smartwatch. It comes in 42mm or 47mm sizes and promises 24 days of battery life.

Another big story this week revolved around a trio of iPhone XI dummies. While obviously not the final products, they do add a face to the rumors.

Finally Realme introduced the Realme 3i and brought the Realme X to India.

See you in a week!