It looks like the Samsung Galaxy S20 will be a pretty safe purchase for 5G aficionados this year. Qualcomm today announced its third-generation X60 5G modem, and while 2021's phones will feature better ways to combine different lanes of 5G spectrum, the X60 doesn't have the massive jump in coverage and capabilities we saw between the X50 and X55.
The new Qualcomm X60 modem could start appearing in phones toward the end of this year—it's already too late for this September's Apple iPhone lineup—and it will come along with or be part of the Snapdragon 875, or whatever Qualcomm's 2021 integrated chipset is called. For most of us, the announcement is more of a signal about what 5G features are coming up over the next two years.
There is one part of the announcement that could be critical for 5G phone design next year, and it isn't the modem: it's Qualcomm's QTM535 antenna module. The QTM535 is the next generation of the little antenna patch needed to support millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G in phones. Qualcomm says it will support "new, premium, sleek phone designs" and have "improved mmWave performance," both of which phone makers are saying they need.
Recent rumors about Apple's upcoming iPhones, which will feature Qualcomm modems, have Apple complaining about the size of the existing QTM525 modules, using that as a reason to potentially work with other antennas.
Qualcomm isn't giving exact details of how small the QTM535 is or how much range it can extract from mmWave towers, citing competitive concerns. The QTM535 also won't appear in this year's iPhones, as Qualcomm confirmed it will start appearing in phones in "early 2021."
Qualcomm has competition in terms of 5G modems—Samsung, Huawei, and MediaTek all have products in production—but nobody has yet released a phone with a non-Qualcomm mmWave antenna module.
How 5G Will Roll in 2021
The X60 is a 5nm modem, which Qualcomm says promises lower heat and better power efficiency. That's always helpful; the first mainstream phones with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X55 modem, the Samsung Galaxy S20 line, have very large batteries, which suggests the X55 may still consume a bit of power in 5G mode. (Qualcomm refused to say just how much less power the X60 would consume.)
Most of the X60's new features are about combining bands of spectrum in ways that the X55 can't do. The X60 can combine 5G between millimeter wave and sub-6 bands (the X55 can only use one of those categories at a time) and can aggregate between FDD and TDD sub-6 5G bands (ditto.)
Over the next two years, those features won't be that important. Most carriers will be focused primarily on mmWave or sub-6 5G, and most older sub-6 bands will still be 4G. The X60's features really come into play in 2022-23, as carriers start to shift more older frequency bands from 4G over to 5G as more people have 5G phones, and carriers in more countries deploy mmWave.
In the US, the X60 would let New T-Mobile subscribers use old mid-band Sprint spectrum at the same time as they use T-Mobile's millimeter-wave spectrum in key cities, hoisting potential 5G speeds from around 300Mbps to more than double that. This will help New T-Mobile achieve some promises it has made for 2024, but they're for 2024.
The X60 also supports voice over NR; anything lower needs to make voice calls over 4G or 3G. In the US, that is about a later endgame where carriers start flipping entire low frequency bands over to 5G rather than maintaining some 4G service in them. In the US, that's unlikely to happen for consumers before 2024.
But voice-over-NR allows for brand-new, standalone 5G carriers to crop up worldwide, potentially disrupting markets with new forms of service. Once again, that's unlikely to happen in the US, but I'd look at how Jio blew up the Indian market with a new 4G carrier as an example of what could happen elsewhere with 5G.
The X60 also has all of the X55's features, including being a 2G-to-5G modem that supports older networks, and supporting both the existing "non-standalone" 5G networks that rely on 4G anchors as well as future, standalone 5G networks.
We'll hear more about the X60 over the course of this year, but for now, 2020 belongs to the X55—and whatever Apple brings to market.
Further Reading
- TCL's Next-Gen Concept Features Slide-Out Display
- Kuo: Coronavirus Not Delaying Apple's iPhone SE 2, New iPad Pro
- Don't Worry About This Busted Galaxy Z Flip
- Report: Apple Designing In-House 5G iPhone Antenna Module
- More in Mobile Phones