Ahead Of 5G Smartphone Rollout, Qualcomm Announces An Even Better 5G Modem

Over the past year, Qualcomm and its partners have given us plenty of reasons why the upcoming 5G rollout is worth getting excited over. Many of the performance claims have been undoubtedly impressive. In effect, it seems like we’ll be getting more performance than we even “need”, which means there should be lots of room to grow into future bandwidth requirements.

All of the performance we’ve seen from Qualcomm so far has been conducted with its Snapdragon X50 5G chipset, but ahead of the Mobile World Congress, the company has decided to follow that up before it even has a chance to see customer hands. To be clear, we’ll still be seeing handsets with the X50; X55 is a future product, and is expected to hit some phones at the end of the year.

The flagship feature of X55 over X50 is a boost from an already impressive 5Gbps up to 7Gbps. Since most people reading this don’t even have access to 1Gbps home internet connections, the thought of even 2Gbps on a phone is drool-worthy. 5 and 7Gbps is insanity – the good kind. 1Gbps equals a theoretical 125MB/s, so suffice to say, bandwidth is not going to be a problem for a while. Of course, 5G is also about improving latencies, which is likely even more important than throughput. It’s just not as fun to talk about!

According to Qualcomm, the X55 is the first modem to support 100MHz envelope tracking technology, as well as adaptive antenna tuning for 5G sub-6GHz, both of which will help with power efficiency. Considering how power efficient 4G is in comparison to Wi-Fi, it’s good to see things continue to get even more refined!

With Mobile World Congress taking place next week, it’s a given that we’ll be seeing the first 5G handsets launched at the event. 5G marks the most major update to cellular infrastructure in a decade, so we can probably afford to wait a few more months.