It looks like we're getting to the stage when smartphone manufacturers and chip designers are starting to show their hand in terms of the silicon that will power 2019's flagship phones. 

It looks like Huawei will reveal the Kirin 980 at IFA 2018 at the end of August - that will come to the new Huawei Mate that will probably be with us in October. That processor will almost certainly also power the P21 and P21 Pro that may be with us around March. 

2019 is significant because we'll have 5G-capable phones from the start of the year (likely beginning with Samsung's Galaxy S10) even if we won't have the networks to go with them.

We already know that 2019 phones will have Qualcomm's X50 5G modems and accompanying fingertip-sized QTM052 mmWave antenna module.  Expect next year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February to be dominated by 5G. 

WinFuture's Roland Quandt claims that Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips have been in production through the summer which would make sense to us. However, he cites a source as being a Xiaomi handset that's popped up on Geekbench.

One problem there - the motherboard is identified by Geekbench as the Snapdragon 835 platform, while the performance shown isn't what you'd expect. 

A report surfaced earlier today saying that Lenovo would be first to launch a Snapdragon 855 handset in quotes attributed to vice president Chang Cheng but we haven't managed to track down a source for that story so we're taking it with a huge pinch of salt. 

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