Kyocera can actually explain what 5G is for. The rugged-smartphone company showed a bunch of concept phones and devices at CES that took a refreshingly pragmatic approach to 5G. Rather than just being "faster," they have distinct use cases, and Kyocera's Curtis Wick said the company won't build them until its carrier and enterprise customers are convinced they're needed.
"They're purpose-built devices, so we're working with customers to build what they need," Wick said.
Kyocera has a very long history in the US mobile phone market. It bought Qualcomm's handset business back in 1999, setting up a 20-year relationship with Verizon and Sprint. The company developed one of the earliest US smartphones, the Palm OS-powered 6035. Recently, it's focused on rugged phones primarily for business customers in its DuraForce and DuraXV lines. The company also, by the way, makes excellent knives.
In the 5G era, Kyocera is going deeper into enterprise, Wick said. A custom 5G phone for emergency medical technicians (below) has an arm strap and a gimbal camera attached, so EMTs can beam video to doctors at a hospital and get live video instructions back—something that could benefit from 5G's low latency and high speed.
A tablet Kyocera is developing for farmers (below) doubles as a drone controller, potentially working with custom software to monitor livestock health and movements using body tags on the livestock.
The company also showed a 5G "smart router" concept: It's about the size of a paperback book but can connect up to 100 devices to the Internet at a time using Wi-Fi 6. The router runs Android on a Snapdragon 865 for "edge compute" capabilities.
For instance, a building could have a slew of surveillance cameras connected to it, and an app running on the router could initially process the feeds to detect motion. Then only the relevant streams would be uploaded to the network using the 5G connection.
The devices will have both millimeter-wave and sub-6GHz 5G using Qualcomm's X55 modem, potentially along with some more arcane enterprise forms of 5G. Some customers are asking for 5G in unlicensed frequencies, Wick said. Other hotly requested enterprise 5G features, including network slicing and ultra-reliable communication, aren't available in today's chipsets, so they aren't in this generation of devices.
How About Those mmWave Cases?
With materials company D3O saying that fast 5G millimeter-wave systems have trouble penetrating through existing case materials, I asked Wick about whether that's going to affect Kyocera's designs.
It turns out that yes, you do have to design phones differently for millimeter-wave, and older case materials that are being used in business contexts can create signal problems, Wick said. "But we're not looking at a case; we're building it rugged at the start," he said. Kyocera's new 5G devices will be made of mmWave-friendly materials, he said.