Qualcomm has showcased phone form factor including the mmWave antenna modules and have publicly stated that we can expect Qualcomm powered 5G smartphone devices in the first half of 2019.
Companies like Oppo and Xiaomi have already teased a phone form factor device with 5G connectivity and earlier this year both companies said that they plan to use the Snapdragon X50 5G from Qualcomm.
Huawei silent on phone form factor 5G
Huawei this year didn’t want to talk about 5G, but it said it is working on it. This is probably coming at the latter part of next year, but no one wanted to confirm any time frame.
Samsung, on the other hand, had a 5G banner at IFA. Yes, your heard me right, it had a banner with some basic information about its recently announced 5G NR Exynos modem 5100. A spokesperson at Samsung booth gave us a friendly smile when we asked about some demos. It was confirmed to us that this was not the place or time for such a demonstration, implying that things are not as advanced as we might hope for. Back at MWC 2018 the company did show Customer-premises Equipment CPE modules and later this year talked about possible 5G NR launch in June 2019. We've seen the CPE SoC and this is too big to fit a phone form factor.
Samsung had a printed info banner
The banner did reveal a few things including some projected speeds. The chipset supports sub 6GHz and mmWave in one chipset including GSMA, CDMA, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, HSPA, LTE and 5G NR.
The Exynos 5100 5G NR modem promises up to 2 Gbps in sub 6GHz and 6Gbps with millimeter wave. These are some decent speed jumps, considering that Exynos 9810 peak speed stops with 1.2Gbps with 4x4 MIMO and Carrier aggregation with GigabitLTE.
Samsung packs a baseband modem, RFIC, Envelope tracking and Power Management IC as a part of the solution but it is not sure where the filters are coming from.
Last, but not least, one detail is that the chipset supports 4x4 MIMO, 256 bit QAM, 100 MHz Bandwidth for sub 6Hz and Hybrid beamforming for mmWaves. Timeframe, future but most likely in 2019.
