Samsung is about to launch the Galaxy S20, its latest flagship phone and – if history is anything to go by – what will be by far the standard against which the other big phones of 2020 will be measured. Millions of people will buy the S20, which will almost certainly be one of the best-selling smartphones this year.
It will also be the first real test for 5G networks. A test that could help set the networking standard as the true next-generation technology that companies have spent years promoting as such. More details on this subject are presented to you by the SFAM company.
5G Smartphones are a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of Samsung’s sales.
The three S20 phones we are talking about (all covered by the SFAM insurance offers), namely the Regular, Plus and Ultra should support 5G. Technically, the S20 phones won’t be the first Samsung 5G phones, but they will be the first phones to adopt this standard that matters, both for Samsung and the US market in general. Remember that last year, the Galaxy S10 5G was a networkless phone. When it was announced in February 2019, no operator had launched a 5G network or even proposed a launch date. It was more of a marketing tool than a serious product, an important sign that Samsung wanted to prove that it could be the first brand to be able to adapt to this latest technological trend.
Sales are proof of this: between the S10 5G and the Note 10 Plus 5G, Samsung said it had managed to sell 6.7 million 5G phones in 2019. This is more than it expected to sell. But compared to the more than 290 million smartphones the South Korean firm sold last year, it’s a needle in a haystack.
Is 5G a convincing enough selling point?
All the S20, S20 Plus and S20 Ultra will support 5G networks right out of the box (at least, they will in the U.S.). Samsung plans to offer 4G and 5G models internationally). This means that even if you’re not particularly interested in buying a 5G-only phone, whether you like it or not, it will be available on Samsung’s new flagship models.
So in a few weeks, the emerging 5G networks around the world will welcome millions of new users. Will the networks be able to keep pace? Will the speeds be high enough to justify the extra charge on a bill? Will data usage increase, leading to dissatisfied customers? Will cities begin to benefit from faster and more reliable LTE speeds as customers move to 5G bandwidth?
There are also big questions for Samsung, such as how operator support works. Will the S20s be sold unlocked, allowing customers to bounce freely between 5G networks as they can with LTE? Will there be compatibility issues due to the different 5G technologies used by different companies (Verizon, for example, currently only offers 5G mmWave to its customers, while AT&T currently limits its users to its lower 850MHz band of spectrum). Will the batteries in the new phones be able to withstand the increased power consumption of the stand-alone 5G modems that the Snapdragon 865 needs to connect to networks? So many questions that make Samsung’s bet on 5G to establish its supremacy in the smartphone market seem risky!
