One of China’s largest phone manufacturer ZTE, has just announced their newest offering which will be one of the first phones in the world to offer gigabit speeds, for now, aptly called the Gigabit Phone.
The company did not really indicate as to the technology that will go behind creating the phone ability to connect at such speeds, but it is planned to be released at the MWC 2017. This will probably be one of the only phones right now that will be able to support the 5G data frequency, offering much higher speeds than existing 4G data speeds.
ZTE to announce the first gigabit phone at MWC (Karlis Dambrans/Flickr)
The ZTE phone will supposedly come with features such as 360-degree VR (which means we can expect to see a companion headset to come bundled along with the phone perhaps), 4K video recording and instant cloud storage (whether it will be tied to Google Drive or Dropbox or the company’s own cloud solution has not been confirmed yet). The phone will also feature some Hi-Fi music components in the phone (perhaps something like the Quad DAC on the V20, hopefully) as well as support for Daydream.
As mentioned by The Verge in their report, the phone will join the league of other devices to have 5G connectivity that were announced last year when Qualcomm had partnered with Netgear, Ericsson and Telstra to enable a hotspot technology that would provide 1Gbps downloads. Qualcomm is making necessary steps to ensure its future chipsets are also similarly capable of outputting to those speeds, by adding its LTE-capable, gigabit producing X16 modem included in its Snapdragon 835 processor. Whether this processor will be available on the phone as of yet is not yet confirmed.
Android Community thinks that it possibly could still be too early to implement 5G connected phones to the market since the technology will not hit the market before the next couple of years at least. It’s good to see that smartphone makers are future-proofing their phones to be ready for newer experiences and technological innovations well in advance. Although no word on the specifications of the phone has been announced just yet, we should see some big specifications on the spec-sheet when the phone is released this MWC 2017.