Qualcomm has announced at the CES 2019 fair that it expects this year to be “the year of 5G”, since more than 30 5G devices, mostly smartphones, will be announced.
According to Qualcomm, the company has won almost all chip contracts for the launch of 5G devices in 2019. During Qualcomm’s 5G summit in December, both Verizon and AT&T operators announced that they will launch 5G smartphones developed by Samsung in 2019 with Qualcomm’s 5G modems.
Although Samsung has its own 5G modem, Qualcomm’s antenna and chip hardware seems to be the most suitable for 5G millimeter-wave implementations in the United States, so Samsung will use Snapdragon modems on at least some of its American smartphones.
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Another smaller operator, Sprint, has also announced that it will offer a Samsung 5G smartphone, which will use 2.5 GHz radio spectrum instead of millimeter wave, while T-Mobile will apparently use Intel’s 5G mobile platform.
Qualcomm’s CEO, Cristiano Amon, showed a prototype of a 5G phone at the end of last year, and his Snapdragon X50 modem was announced as a component of the Moto 5G accessory of the Motorola Moto Z3 phone.
In other Qualcomm news, the company also announced that it’ll be showcasing “artificial-intelligence intuitive in-vehicle experiences” at CES for “next generation vehicles.”
It’s unclear when any of that will actually make its way to a commercial car that you can purchase, but it’ll still be exciting to see what Qualcomm envisions for the future of automobiles.