Having shaken up its product naming, we were all waiting for Qualcomm to announce new mid-range hardware: that's now been officially confirmed in the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1.

This hardware sits below the Snapdragon 8 tier, so it's mid-range or sub-flagship depending on how you look at the market. Essentially, it inherits a lot of the features developed at the top tier, but allows development of devices at a slightly lower price point.

And we've been mightily impressed with some of the recent Snapdragon 700 series devices that came before, so this is an important announcement.

Qualcomm is calling it the "total gaming package", not because it's the most powerful, but because it will deliver a top tier gaming experience to many people who can't afford or don't want a flagship phone. Basically, it's going to allow better gaming on lower cost devices, which is important to a lot of smartphone users.

There's a 20 per cent graphics boost compared to the previous generation - the Snapdragon 778G - while it also supports Quad HD+ displays and video capture up to 4K HDR and 200-megapixel sensors.

You can expect lightning-fast connectivity thanks to the X62 modem which supports 3GPP Release 16 5G, but offers 4.4Gbps connectivity, so not as fast as the top tier like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1.

There's also a big boost in AI performance, some 30 per cent increased over the Snapdragon 778G, while there's also support for premium features like Snapdragon Sound.

The good news is that manufacturers appear to be lining up to launch devices on this new hardware - with Qualcomm confirming to us that 16 manufacturers have expressed an interest - and that we'll see devices from the likes of Honor, Oppo and Xiaomi in Q2 2022.