Testing 5G: Hype vs. Reality

Are phones getting a "5G tax"?

You may have seen a lot of new phones coming out lately with 5G built-in, and you may also have realized that the prevailing trend of the past few years, which is flagships getting ever more expensive, seems to have accelerated wildly this year. Even brands that were once associated with value above all else are now offering way less of that than they used to.

What's the connection? It might be 5G, actually. While this isn't a conspiracy theory, it is just a theory - one we've stringed together based on a lot of assumptions, so bear with us but keep in mind that this isn't inside information, it's just what we think makes most sense.

First off, in the Android world every flagship device worth its salt uses the Snapdragon 865 chipset from Qualcomm. There are few exceptions and we'll address them in due course. The 865 doesn't have an integrated modem, so when you buy it, you are required to add the X55 5G modem, also made by Qualcomm. This is jam-packed with new technology, so it's clearly not cheap, adding that 'not-cheap-ness' on top of the 865's price, which is definitely not a bargain either.

But wait, for 5G to actually work you also need RF circuitry and antennas - more of them than for previous Gs, in fact, and many more if you want to support mmWave as well as Sub-6. See where this is going? All of this stuff costs handset makers money, and those costs add up quickly.

There's an indirect issue too. Because the modem isn't built into the chipset, it takes up more space inside the phone. Because you need to have a bunch of antennas everywhere, those need more space than fewer antennas would. This gets us to the rumored (but never officially confirmed) tidbit that Qualcomm is also mandating a specific minimum volume for phones using its top of the line 5G chip, to ensure that all of those components have somewhere to go and aren't close enough to each other to create interference or excessive heat.

So now if you're a phone maker you're basically constrained by all these factors into making a handset that isn't compact. And if it's bigger, then you might as well add a big display, with tiny bezels, to adhere to the other prevailing trend of the recent few years. But wait, it's 2020 now and a high refresh rate is a must have on your spec list, and that isn't free either, from a cost perspective. All of these new connectivity parts, added to the bigger screen, pretty much require larger batteries. No one wants their premier flagship laughed out of the mobile space by having inadequate battery life, so let's add that too. To the final cost, of course.

And this is how we ended up with flagships that are even more expensive than last year.

Yes, Samsung uses its own Exynos chipset in a lot of the world for the S20 line, but that also doesn't have an integrated modem, so most of the considerations above could still reasonably apply to it.

And what about Huawei? Well, its Kirin 990 5G SoC does actually have an integrated modem, and guess what - the P40 Pro and P40 Pro+ are slightly more compact devices than their competitors. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. The thing is we'll never know for sure, as manufacturers understandably don't want such information to get out in the open.

But this is a very likely possibility. And it would explain why flagship prices have gone out of control. So if you want to, blame Qualcomm. But keep in mind that while its strategy of mandating the 5G modem be used with the Snapdragon 865 may indeed have driven the average flagship's price up (both directly and indirectly), it's also definitely helped make 5G adoption across the world faster than 4G's was.

There are more and more phones with 5G now, which means carriers are scrambling to add more and more 5G towers. What took 4G a few years to achieve will take 5G way less. 5G adoption, when looked at on a global scale, has also been massively helped by China's decision to go all-in with it, as it's the home of the three of the biggest carriers in the world.

What about mid-rangers, then? Well, Qualcomm has the Snapdragon 765/765G/768 chipsets for that bracket with 5G actually built-in, only these don't seem to be exceptionally cheap in general, and they also don't have amazing performance either, for the 'premium mid-range' price tier. Don't worry though, for affordable 5G phones are coming, they're just more likely to be powered by something built by MediaTek.

The Taiwanese chip maker's Dimensity series of 5G capable chips haven't made a dent in the market yet, but that could change by the end of the year. They seem to offer very good performance for the price, and that price appears to be low enough to enable cheaper smartphones than those with Qualcomm's 7-series solution, all other specs being the same. Huawei has its Kirin 820 5G too.

One way or another, 5G won't be constrained to the high-end for much longer. Xiaomi sub-brand Redmi even wants all of its devices costing $200 and over to have 5G by next year, and that will be a huge driver of adoption. Which in turn will make carriers strive to put up even more towers, and so on.

So while at the moment 5G may not look important because it's not ubiquitous, its ubiquity may arrive much faster than you could anticipate. It's not a matter of years (plural), it's probably going to be in most places within one year or so from now.

Battery life concerns

Another 5G-related issue might have to do with the battery consumption of those brand spanking new 5G modems, especially the ones that aren't built into the chipset itself. As we noted above, because 5G handsets are just not small by any stretch of the imagination, manufacturers have added bigger batteries in those bodies too. Just by looking at the sheer mAh numbers, this trend is easy to spot.

However, you shouldn't let those numbers guide you astray in thinking that you'd get the best battery life in history with these devices, given their ample capacities. Not really. As with any new "G", the fifth one also seems to currently consume more power than its fourth-gen predecessor. Whether that's because there's more RF circuitry involved, or if it's just because the modem is external to the chipset, we can't tell, but this does seem to apply even to using a 5G device on a 4G network.

The bigger and higher refresh rate screens clearly don't help here either, and when you add those on top of the 5G pie, you have flagship phones with huge batteries but just decent - or even average - battery life. This is the way things are, at least for now. This is true for Exynos-powered 5G Samsungs as well as Snapdragon 865 handsets (although slightly less for the latter), and yet interestingly battery life is not as much of an issue for Kirin 990 powered phones. We're betting that has something to do with the fact that this SoC has an integrated 5G modem, but this is one of those things we'll never be able to definitively prove.

The point here is that if you're searching for a 5G phone to buy, you shouldn't just compare its battery capacity to your current device's and draw conclusions from there. Make sure you compare objective battery life scores, such as the one in our battery test, which is included in all of our reviews. That will give you a much clearer image of what you should expect, so there's less of a chance for disappointment.

So should you pull the trigger?

If you're going to buy a phone, should you make sure it has 5G? It's... complicated. To help, ask yourself this - how long will you be keeping that phone?

If your country has no intention of allowing 5G to happen within the next year and you intend to switch to something else in a year, then having a 5G phone is irrelevant to you right now. But polls say that the average person holds onto a smartphone for around 2-3 years, and that's an entirely different timeline to consider. Save for a few holdouts, 5G will probably be everywhere in 3 years.

But even that may not matter. What if you're not an early adopter and you simply don't care about new technologies when they're still not mature or you don't want to pay for the new fad? Well in this case look at the speeds your carrier is currently able to provide on 4G. If those are actually good enough for your use cases, then it makes no sense for you to go with a 5G device now. But if they're not satisfactory, then maybe you would benefit from a 2x-3x increase in those speeds, which 5G can probably deliver to you, even Sub-6, even on low(er) bands. That is, unless your carrier has decided to use less spectrum / bandwidth for 5G than it does for 4G, in which case the benefits of jumping to the new technology may have more to do with (possible) coverage than speed.

The numbers aren't as high as marketing people would want them to be, but let's ignore the hype and talk about real world stuff. This all depends on what you use your mobile connection for, and how happy you are with its current performance. If you're not very happy, or not always, if top quality video streams buffer for you more often than not, if downloads are slow, then you probably want to future proof yourself with a 5G phone.

However, if your carrier doesn't already offer 5G, then you'd need to figure out which bands will be used for 5G in your country, and pick your device accordingly. Oh, and also keep in mind that we've seen a lot of early issues with phones from different regions. Basically, some phone makers don't enable 5G for all carriers everywhere, on an unlocked basis, like with 4/3/2G.

This is probably done out of an abundance of caution, but it's annoying nevertheless and this means your best bet to get 5G running is to get the phone straight from your carrier.

It's all quite messy, so it would be understandable if you just ignore all this 5G hype, but don't discount the very real benefits it has to offer just because it's overhyped. By that logic, no one should be using the S20 Ultra's zoom camera for any magnification level - just on the account of the fact that the 100x "Space Zoom" is practically useless. Will 5G offer you 100x your current speed? No, and it will never do that, but so what?

Depending on where you live, 5G may actually consistently give you speeds that are above what some people in the same country get via wired internet connections, and at latencies that while not similar (yet), aren't necessarily very far off. Is that something to just discount off hand? We don't think so. It's important to look past the sheer hype and see things for what they are.