What to expect around 5G at Mobile World Congress 2019
Hot on the heels of CES comes Mobile World Congress, the biggest mobile event of the year. While it is difficult to pick the most exciting new thing among 2,400+ exhibitors that feature everything from foldable phones to connected cars and VR headsets, it’s clear the biggest news swirling around MWC this year is 5G, which aims to deliver an age of rapid innovation by making it possible to connect virtually everything at speeds, reliability and performance not yet seen.
While artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things are surely going to be among the most popular buzzwords surrounding the future of 5G, Qualcomm Technologies is helping people think specifically about what 5G will begin to deliver in 2019: speed and responsiveness. 5G’s hyper-fast speeds and drastically reduced latency times are going to have a substantial impact on how we currently use our smartphones, making it possible to do what we love in more places, with less hassle and shorter wait times.
5G is designed to enable you to download videos onto your smartphone from just about anywhere with virtually no buffer time – and they won’t be in 720p, but in 4K. If you are already all caught up on your favorite movies and TV shows, you could switch over to live multiplayer gaming without fearing the dreaded surprise lag in the heat of battle.
That speed can also bring fresh appeal to young technologies waiting for a mobile platform that will let them reach their full creative capacity, like Virtual and Augmented Reality. The Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platform is designed to make AR features like scanning your neighborhood for restaurants by holding up your smartphone quick and easy, and with high data frame rates for a more seamless experience. Users may also become accustomed to more complex AR uses only possible with 5G, such as a feature where you can scan a piece of furniture at a boutique shop, project it right away onto 3D model of your apartment, and then share that model with your roommate. The kinds of uses of AR that once seemed to be only in the hands of programmers who pay top dollar for their devices could become more commonplace in 2019.
And the applications don’t stop there: with 5G’s speed and dramatically reduced lag time, live multilingual translation during video chat can be made possible, allowing people to talk to others speaking different languages around the world. We have been hearing how apps and social media will bring people together for years, but it seems that 5G and apps built upon this new network might finally deliver that promise, by letting us communicate with one another no matter what language we use or where we happen to be.
Now that carriers around the world are getting their 5G networks online, Qualcomm Technologies recently announced two of the world’s most advanced 5G products: the Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform and the Snapdragon X55 5G Modem, which are designed to support premium mobile devices with multi-gigabit speeds. Of course, many of the major carriers hopping on the 5G train will be serving up announcements of their own, giving us a glimpse of where we can expect 5G coverage in 2019. Unlike CES back in January, MWC will also fully introduce us to a fleet of 5G mobile devices, including the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and Samsung Galaxy Fold, with many more to come over the next few days.
The Snapdragon mobile platforms and the premium 5G devices they power are going to start entering our lives in a big way in 2019. So keep an eye out at MWC, where we get our first glimpse of these 5G devices – and the exciting new mobile experiences they bring.
Keep up with more 5G announcements throughout MWC here: Everything You Need to Know About 5G.
Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com