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The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile chipset was officially unveiled last monthand every time the company unveils a new chipset, it’s always a race to see which Android manufacturer will be the first to put it in a commercially available handset.

This year, Americans wanting to get their hands on the first device equipped with the new chipset will have to turn to a lesser-known brand, as Chinese manufacturer Nubia is the first to come out with a device available to order now.

As spotted by Android Authoritythe distinction goes to the Nibia Z70 Ultra which is now available for order directly from the company website. Along with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, it packs a 6.85-inch, 2,688 x 1,216 full-screen display with a 144Hz refresh rate and a 6,150mAh battery with 80W fast charging.

Chinese manufacturer Nubia is the first to come out with a handset available to order now.

The triple camera includes a 64 MP telephoto lens, as well as two 50 MP lenses for regular and ultra-wide shots. Appealingly for photography enthusiasts, Nubia notes that the main 35mm camera has an “adjustable physical aperture for real-world shooting.”

The phone can have 12GB, 16GB, or 24GB of RAM installed, and each upgrade coincides with an increase in storage, with capacities of 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB available (there’s no mention of expandable storage, so that’s something to consider if you decide to order the phone). It works in particular Android 15 ready to use, making it the first phone to do so. Although recent versions of Pixel 9 can be packaged this way now, they ship with Android 14 at launch.

While all of these specs are impressive, it’s undoubtedly the processor that’s the star of the show. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is a 3nm chip with two main cores running at 4.3GHz and six performance cores. Notably, there are no efficiency cores this time around.

This all adds up to a processor that offers a serious performance boost over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, with Qualcomm suggesting you can expect a 45% improvement in single-core and multi-core tasks. Despite the lack of efficient cores, the company says power efficiency is also expected to improve by 44%.

We can’t vouch for the latter yet, as we haven’t had extended time with a Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered handset. But we ran our other tests on Qualcomm’s reference devices, and the the results were indeed impressive.

Here’s how our test fared compared to other leading smartphones:

We fully expect the SamsungGalaxy S25 has launch with chipset early next yearbut if you can’t wait that long, the Nubia is an option to order today. Prices start at $829 (with $50 off using code SAVE50) with shipping expected from December 5.

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