Qualcomm's newest earbud chip can connect straight to Wi-Fi, skipping your phone entirely.
The company's new Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 is the first of its chips to build micro-power Wi-Fi 6E directly into the silicon. That lets earbuds or audio glasses join your home Wi-Fi network on their own, then stream lossless audio from the cloud without routing through a paired phone. Leave your phone on the charger or lost in the couch cushions, and the audio keeps playing. It's Qualcomm's attempt to get past the range and dropout limits that Bluetooth has always had.
This is Qualcomm's second run at this pitch. In 2023, its S7 Pro platform and Expanded Personal Area Network tech made the same argument, that Wi-Fi could do what Bluetooth can't, and it didn't turn into a wave of Wi-Fi-connected earbuds on shelves. Putting the radio directly on the audio chip this time, rather than treating it as an add-on feature, suggests Qualcomm thinks the bottleneck was cost and power draw, not the underlying idea.
Whether that's enough to get device makers to actually build around it, or whether Elite Gen 2 becomes another spec sheet footnote like XPAN, is the real test.