Why you should not waste your money on a ‘5G’ phone in 2019

“Smartphone makers and network carriers are doing their best to hype up 5G as the next big thing, with the first wave of 5G-enabled smartphones due to hit this year,” Krishan Sharma writes for The Sydney Morning Post. “5G stands for “fifth generation mobile”, and it utilises increased allocation of radio spectrum to deliver faster download speeds, ultra-low latency and more capacity; allowing more people to use higher speeds at the same time, limiting congestion.”
“Every major handset maker (except Apple) plans to release a 5G-capable smartphone in 2019,” Sharma writes. “However the reality is that 5G hardware is going to be a decidedly first-generation affair, where early adopters of 5G smartphones will have to accept all manner of tradeoffs.”
There’ll be “a hefty premium [US$200-$300] to pay for a phone that will likely have less battery life and a larger footprint than a 4G phone,” Sharma writes. “5G is primarily being sold to consumers on the promise of delivering blazingly fast network speeds, but in the first few years at least they won’t be much faster than existing 4G speeds.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Expect the iPhone cloners, Samsung et al., to tout “5G” regardless since – given the fact that all they do is peddle pretend iPhones to the ignorant – they believe, likely correctly, that their customers won’t know any better.
Apple is going to wait until 5G is worth supporting, not rush it to market in order to bilk the ignoranti with a check mark on a spec sheet that most will never use in 2019. If 5G actually mattered to enough people in 2019, Apple would have a 5G iPhone available in 2019. 5G is still very much in the trial phase and will have very limited availability in 2018. There is currently no standard for 5G deployments. The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance says that 5G should be rolled out in the U.S. by 2020. — MacDailyNews, December 3, 2018
SEE ALSO:
Apple will wait until at least 2020 to release a 5G iPhone – December 3, 2018
More evidence that Apple’s building its own cellular modem – July 31, 2017
Apple’s next-gen iPhones said to lack 5G modem to match rivals’ data speed – June 9, 2017
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Ninetimesoutoften” for the heads up.]