Almost five years after Niantic helped popularize augmented reality (AR) with Pokémon GO, the company, with Planet-Scale AR Alliance, is debuting a new 5G AR experience with Codename: Urban Legends. The game is designed as a demo to showcase the power of 5G and AR.
Expand Expanding Close
A new study looking into what smartphone features matter most to iPhone and Android users reveals that 5G is on the bottom of the list with longer battery life being the top request. Other findings include that about 1 out of 3 consumers plan to keep their smartphones for more than three years.
Expand Expanding Close
A new report from Opensignal paints a rough picture for how 5G performance on the iPhone 12 lineup stacks up against Android smartphones in the US. The majority of the top 25 fastest 5G smartphones ended up being made by Samsung and while iPhone 12 saw a 2.3x jump in 5G speeds compared to its 4G iPhone speeds, Apple’s first 5G iPhones placed at the bottom of the pack and behind at least 25 Android smartphones for overall download speed.
Expand Expanding Close
As carriers gradually move beyond LTE, we’re starting to see 5G home broadband services compete with cable and fiber as your primary internet service provider.
Verizon has announced an expansion of its existing 5G Home service to 10 more cities, and T-Mobile has said that its own version will launch before the end of this month …
Expand Expanding Close
If you want full-speed Verizon 5G when it comes online around the end of the year, you’re going to have to splash out on one of the company’s premium plans.
The company made the admission about its 5G plans during a Virtual Investor Day presentation …
Expand Expanding Close
Last year, if you were just listening to the major US carriers, it seemed like 2020 was the year that impressive 5G coverage with lightning-fast speeds was going to arrive for the masses. However, what actually arrived for many was very small pockets of dramatically faster speeds, with overall speeds not so different from 4G. A new report from Speedcheck today dives into why the rollout of 5G in the US turned out to be so disappointing, and also gives some hope for why 2021 could be the year carriers’ 5G coverage really starts to deliver.
Expand Expanding Close
Ming-Chi Kuo of TF International Securities has published a new report for Apple supply chain investors in which the reliable analyst predicts a bold design change for what could be the iPhone 14 Pro. Kuo also expects the next iPhone SE release to bring 5G cellular connectivity to the entry-priced models. Here’s what they predict to come across 2022.
Expand Expanding Close
If your experience has been that 5G is slow compared to the speeds we’ve been promised in all the marketing hype, that’s no surprise, according to experts – especially in the case of Verizon and AT&T …
Expand Expanding Close
The Uncarrier is out today with a new cellular plan that boasts truly unlimited data with no slowdowns. While that might sound strange at first, most US carriers’ “unlimited plans” actually become throttled after a certain amount of data use. T-Mobile’s new unlimited 5G plan also features support for streaming 4K video, and a solid hotspot allowance.
Expand Expanding Close
The popularity of the iPhone 12 meant Apple overtook Samsung in smartphone sales in the final quarter of last year, the first time this has happened in four years, says Gartner.
The market intelligence firm says Apple saw year-on-year growth of 14.9%, while Samsung saw its own sales fall by 11.8% in the same period…
Expand Expanding Close
5G might still be at a rather early stage in terms of coverage, but that’s not stopping work on Apple’s 6G plans. The goal of 6G is to allow speeds up to 100 times faster than 5G, but that is simply a broad ambition at this stage, with much of the required technology still to be figured out.
Apple has placed job ads for research engineers to work on the next generation of high-speed mobile data…
Expand Expanding Close
A new study is out today from speed test provider Ookla and M Science that looks into the most popular 5G smartphones in the US. After less than a year since launch, the iPhone 12 Pro Max has become the most popular choice. Notably, the iPhone 12 lineup also made up the first 3 of the top 5 in the study.
Expand Expanding Close
Verizon mmWave 5G coverage is set to almost double this year, according to a statement in the company’s latest earnings report. The carrier says that it will add 14,000 mmWave 5G locations to the 16,000 it already has.
The announcement does, however, need to be understood in context …
Expand Expanding Close
A pair of reports are out today from Opensignal detailing the state of 5G as well as the broader mobile experience in the US. The findings include T-Mobile leading the 5G race when it comes to availability and speed. Meanwhile, Verizon was able to pick up two wins for 5G video experiences and continues to lead the 4G experience.
Expand Expanding Close
The world’s largest manufacturer of ceramic capacitors, used in the iPhone 12 and other 5G smartphones, expects the 5G phone market to reach half a billion devices this year.
Some analysts believe that this is, if anything, an under-estimate …
Expand Expanding Close
While all of last year’s iPhones got support for the more common sub-6GHz form of 5G, the much faster mmWave 5G iPhones were limited to US models only. But that may be set to change this year.
We’ve previously outlined the two main types of 5G …
Expand Expanding Close
The iPhone 12 gives you the ability to turn off 5G if you want to maximize battery life, but tests indicate that Verizon users might want to do so for a second, and somewhat bizarre reason: to get faster mobile data speeds!
Tests were performed using an iPhone 12 Pro at eight locations around New York City, but similar results are likely to be seen elsewhere …
Expand Expanding Close
The iPhone 12 became the world’s best-selling 5G smartphone in October, despite preorders opening halfway through the month, says Counterpoint Research.
The company split out the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro …
Expand Expanding Close
One of the headline features of the iPhone 12 lineup was, of course, 5G support. I said beforehand that 5G coverage is barely a thing yet, even in London – and subsequent tests have demonstrated I was right.
I’ve been conducting periodic speed tests at various locations in central London, and while it does occasionally deliver impressive speeds, this is far from the norm …
Expand Expanding Close
Swedish networking giant Ericsson has reported that the 5G rollout is progressing faster than expected and that around a billion people worldwide will have coverage by the end of this year.
The report says this makes 5G rollout faster than both 3G and 4G/LTE …
Expand Expanding Close
Verizon and Apple have partnered to offer a new enterprise iPhone upgrade program called “Fleet Swap.” As the name suggests “Fleet Swap” allows businesses to upgrade all their smartphones — from any carrier — to the new iPhone 12 models and notably with zero upfront cost.
Expand Expanding Close
Justine Ezarik, otherwise known as iJustine, was recently joined via video by Apple’s product line manager for the iPhone, Francesca Sweet. Francesca and iJustine discussed 5G — arguably the most significant selling point for the iPhone 12 line.
Expand Expanding Close
Qualcomm today reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2020, which drove the company’s stock price higher tonight. This comes after the company introduced its 5G modems on several smartphones recently, including the iPhone 12 lineup.
Expand Expanding Close
Along with the iPhone 12 lineup debuting with support for the next-generation cellular network, 5G is starting to expand in meaningful ways across all the major US carriers. Now T-Mobile has shared that it has almost doubled the cities where its mid-band 5G is available to over 400 and Verizon is bringing its 5G Home Internet option to more major cities.
Expand Expanding Close