When you look across Samsung’s smartphone and tablet portfolio, you’ll notice that the company uses chips from various vendors. Samsung typically relies on their own chips for high end devices, though this year that’s changed with the S4 getting Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600. Moving down to midrange, again, typically you’d see Samsung’s older chips, but this year we’re seeing the Snapdragon 400 show up in devices like the GS4 Zoom, GS4 Mini, and the Galaxy Mega phone/tablets.

Stepping down yet another peg, to the devices that normally cost under $200, these usually have chips from Broadcom. The Galaxy Young and Galaxy Fame are two Galaxy phones you might not be familiar with, but they’re probably going to be some of Samsung’s best selling phones this year in emerging markets.

With that in mind, I’d like to introduce you to the new “BCM23550” from Broadcom. Horrible name, but here’s what you need to know: Four ARM Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.2 GHz, 21 megabit per second HSPA+ radio, Android 4.2 optimized, 12 megapixel camera support, 1080p hardware accelerate h.264 video encoding and decoding, the latest WiFi, NFC, and just about everything else you need to make a smartphone.

You might not care about whatever sub $200 smartphone Samsung launches next year, but millions of people do. The Galaxy S II, arguably the most advanced Android phone to come out in 2011, is now less than $300. By this time next year, I wouldn’t be surprised if Samsung had an equivalent Galaxy S II class device out on the market for as low as $150.