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It's the closest official look we have to future smartphones from Samsung that come with 5G compatibility.
A variant of Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S10 is said to come with 5G support.
Strolling innocently through Samsung's massive booth at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, I stumbled upon Samsung's 5G prototype smartphone.
There it was, a 5G smartphone prototype from the biggest mobile company in the world, with no fanfare or much interest from any other CES attendee around me. I almost started to believe that only I could see it.
To be clear, the prototype I saw was, indeed, just a prototype. It was the smartphone used to show off 5G capabilities when Verizon and Samsung announced earlier in December that a 5G phone will be coming in early 2019 during a Qualcomm event in Hawaii. I'd doubt that Samsung would brazenly display this device if it had any similarities to the upcoming Galaxy S10, of which one model is rumored to support 5G connectivity.
Still, it's the closest thing we've seen to an official 5G smartphone from Samsung at the moment.
There it is, casually hanging out at the far end of Samsung's 5G hardware display. You can barely see it.
Here's a closer look of the prototype of Samsung's vision of a 5G smartphone. If you were expecting 5G phones to look different, you could be set up for disappointment.
It looked like a perfectly operational unit with a working display, volume buttons, a power button, and even a Bixby button. It even had a case.
The phone's screen cycled through a canned demo that showcased some of the device's features and functions. None of the demos appeared to make use of wireless capabilities however, so it didn't provide much insight into what the super-fast 5G wireless data experience will actually be like.
It's hard to tell from the photo, but the prototype had a notch on the top right corner.
Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S10 is said to have have a hole-punch cutout on the top right of the display. The prototype's corner notch isn't the same thing, but it does show that Samsung is at least experimenting with moving selfie cameras and sensors to a different location away from the top center of its phones.
Caged in its glass enclosure, Samsung's prototype is still a mystery and doesn't reveal that much about the company's future phones.
All we can assume about a 5G smartphone from Samsung is that it'll include the 5G-compatible model of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 mobile chip. What kind of speeds and performance we can realistically expect from mobile 5G vary greatly. It's generally expected that mobile 5G networks will be significantly faster than the current 4G LTE networks we currently use to stream data on our smartphones today.
We'll have to wait and see for a true 5G smartphone connected to a 5G mobile network to find out just how much better 5G will be than what we have now.
