Don’t buy a 5G smartphone—at least, not for a while

Enlarge / 5G is here, but that doesn't mean you have to buy into it.
2019 is going to be the year of 5G—at least, that's what the cellular industry keeps saying. We're going to see the launch of several 5G smartphones from OEMs like Samsung, Motorola, and OnePlus, and carriers will be tripping over themselves to tell you how awesome their new 5G networks are despite coming with a slew of asterisks. I would like to make something up about how ridiculous the 5G hype has gotten, but it's hard to top actual quotes from industry executives, like Verizon's claim that 5G will 'dramatically improve our global society.' Faster mobile Internet is coming, but should you care about it yet?
Qualcomm recently had its big 2019 chip announcement, and as the world's biggest provider of smartphone chips, that gives us a good idea of what the upcoming 5G hardware will look like. The industry is doing its best to hype 5G up as The Next Big Thing™, but 5G hardware in 2019 is going to be a decidedly first-generation affair. Early adopters for 5G will have to accept all manner of tradeoffs. And when there might not even be 5G reception in your area, it might be better to just wait the whole thing out for a year or two.
A 5G mmWave primer: Making use of the spectrum that nobody wanted
'5G' is a shorthand reference to the next generation of cellular network technology that is launching in 2019. The whole 'G' naming scheme started in the 1990s with the launch of GSM, which was called the 'second generation'—aka '2G'—of mobile networking technology. GSM upgraded early networks from analog to digital, and those old analog networks were retroactively given the name '1G.' Since then, we've gotten new 'G' numbers with major coordinated network upgrades about every 10 years. These iterations brought important features like SMS and MMS messages, IP-based networking and mobile Internet, and, of course, more speed.
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