The Snapdragon 888 is the engine that will be used in major Android phones to be released in 2021, and the Samsung Galaxy S21 will likely be one of the first major phones to feature Qualcomm's latest system-on-chip. However, it does not appear that Samsung's flagship will be the first to feature the Snapdragon 888.

Instead, that honor will go to the Xiaomi Mi 11, which will debut before 2020 is over. Chinese phone maker Xiaomi has set a December 28 launch date for the new hardware, which is confirmed to feature Qualcomm's latest silicon.

It is not a surprise that the Xiaomi Mi 11 will be powered by the Snapdragon 888, as Xiaomi was one of the handset makers attending Qualcomm's launch event that promised to include this new mobile processing platform, Snapdragon 888 even said it would power the Mi 11.

However, it is a bit of a surprise that Xiaomi, as opposed to Samsung, is the first out of the gate. In recent years, Samsung's Galaxy S series was usually the first to feature Qualcomm's latest silicon, at least in the U.S. version. (Samsung often uses its own Exynos chips for models released in other countries.)

If you live outside of China, the Xiaomi Mi 11 may be hard to come by. The phone will first be released in China. As such, the launch event on December 28 will be entirely geared toward Chinese audiences when it begins at 7:30 pm CST. (That's 1:30 p.m. CST, or 8:30 a.m. EST.)

After the Xiaomi Mi 11 is launched in the Chinese market, it will likely be rolled out to other countries, but the timing is unknown; TechRadar has estimated that if past Xiaomi rollouts are any indication, late January The Xiaomi Mi 10 appeared outside of China roughly six weeks after its debut in China.

Therefore, Samsung could take some time before launching its own flagship model powered by the Snapdragon 888. Rumors suggest that the Galaxy S21 event will be held on January 14, but there has been no official announcement from Samsung yet.

Therefore, it may be worth keeping an eye on the Xiaomi M11 announcement to see what the Snapdragon 888 will bring to smartphones next year. Qualcomm has already told us to expect performance and graphics improvements over last year's Snapdragon 865, and has also released benchmarks showing how the chip performs in reference devices. But there is more to the Snapdragon 888 platform than just CPU and GPU. Qualcomm is also touting improvements in photography due to advances in artificial intelligence and the image signal processor on the chipset.

It is not yet clear where the Xiaomi M11 will launch after China, but we may hear that it will debut in the UK around the December 28 event. And perhaps we'll get a better idea of what to expect from the rival Android flagship once we hear more about that phone's mobile processor.