However, a very prominent player is not yet in the race: Apple. And now a report has surfaced on Bloomberg, that the Cupertino-based technology giant is not planning to release its 5G smartphone till next year or later. The company will continue with their 4G VoLTE smartphones until the 5G is spread ‘far and wide’. We should mention that Apple did the same thing with 3G and 4G, as it launched a 3G and 4G capable device a year after the market was flooded with such devices from other companies. However, till then company was sure that the connectivity was spread globally and was stable. While 5G is the next generation in connectivity technology, but the technology is still new and it won’t immediately become mainstream, so maybe waiting is the right move for Apple. We should also mention that even a number of the telecom providers right now don’t have 5G connectivity. And the roll-out of the network is expected to be a little slow.
For instance, in the United States, Verizon will be launching its operational 5G connectivity in Los Angeles, Houston, Sacramento and Indianapolis in the coming weeks. If we talk about 5G connectivity in India, it still seems miles away and we possibly won’t be seeing a working 5G network in India in the coming months or even an entire year. Even representative of prominent phone brands seem skeptical about putting 5G in their devices this early in 2019. Having 5G modem in phones come with their own fair share of problems. The earlier 5G modem were bulky and relied on phone’s battery to work. And now that thin and elegant smartphones are mainstream, using 5G modems in the smartphones makes them bulkier which in a way just pushes us back in time. And making bulky and heavy devices is against Apple’s vision of smartphones. But recently, Qualcomm released their newest 5G modem for smartphones named – the Snapdragon X55 which is capable of 5G connectivity and is far better than its predecessors. And most of the 5G smartphones launching in the MWC 2019 are equipped with this very particular modem. 5G connectivity technology still seem miles away from becoming mainstream, and till the time 5G is not available globally, making 5G capable devices seems pointless.
