The upcoming standard of mobile communication, 5G, is the next generation in revolutionizing how we interact with technology and Qualcomm is one of the many companies to have been actively working on developing the 5G technology.
Now, seems like the company has gained major leeway in this department as an image of the world’s first 5G phone surfaces on the internet. A user named Sherif Hanna, who incidentally is also the marketing lead for LTE and 5G NR modems has uploaded a photo stating that is the image of the ‘world’s first 5G smartphone’ on Twitter, this Monday. Notably, Hanna is an employee at the company, working as the Marketing Lead for LTE and 5G NR Modems for Qualcomm.
The phone in the image is the prototype of the company’s first mmWave 5G reference design and not the final unit. The phone has been designed by Qualcomm to test and optimize their 5G mmWave performance within the constraints of a mobile form factor.
Going by the image, the 5G smartphone is seen sporting a horizontally aligned dual camera setup on the rear alongside vertically aligned dual-LED flash. Also, there is a Qualcomm Snapdragon logo at the bottom. Hanna also mentions that the handset is designed to support multi-mode 2G/3G/4G/5G.
Recently at the 2017 Qualcomm 4G/5G Summit, the company announced their first successful demonstration of a 5G data connection on a single-chip 5G modem – the Qualcomm Snapdragon X50 5G modem. In its demo, Qualcomm was able to establish a 5G connection with over 1 gigabit per second download speeds as well as over-the-air- connection via a tiny 28GHz mmWave antenna module.
Interestingly, the International Telecommunication Union is yet to come up with the standards of 5G. However, according to Hanna, the first 5G spec definition will be completed by this December, by the 3GPP. If that is the case, we can expect the 5G technology to be available for general users by the year 2020 at the latest.
