The World’s first 5G phone will be a Lenovo device. And it will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor. Are we ready for 5G?
Chang Cheng, Lenovo’s Vice President, shared the information about the upcoming device on Weibo. You may remember his name, he was the one who posted about the Lenovo Z5 having a 95% screen to body ratio, which turned out to be blatant lies. That was marketing at its worst.
Qualcomm is yet to announce the Snapdragon 855 chipset, but the flagship SoC could be launched by the end of the year. That is usually when we can expect news about the next-gen processor, you know with the 15% faster, 20% better battery life, and some other self-proclaimed “major improvements”.
Even that is okay, but the World’s first 5G phone? We think it is too soon for this, considering that most service providers plan to begin trials of the next-gen mobile network next year.
Lenovo isn’t exactly the company we would expect, to launch the first 5G phone. I would have thought it would be Samsung or Apple, but the company does boast ownership of Motorola, which did launch the first mobile phone. So, Lenovo does have the quality to produce the next-gen device or help develop the technology, like how Samsung co-engineered the Snapdragon 845, and more recently, the Snapdragon 850 (which is a chipset for Windows 10 devices).
But, given that the modem for the 5G network is built into the chipset, it is likely Qualcomm that’s the big name to step up here, rather than Lenovo. There is no word yet about the launch date, we can only speculate that the World’s first 5G phone, will be announced soon after Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon 845.
Let’s just hope that Lenovo doesn’t pull another Z5, with the World’s first 5G phone.