Qualcomm: Our 5G phones will have all-day battery life
Cristiano Amon, president of Qualcomm, has stated that all 5G phones powered by its latest hardware will give you a full day of power.
Despite 5G modems like the Snapdragon X50 and X55 promising multi-gigabit download speeds, Amon was keen to talk up Qualcomm’s ‘5G PowerSave’ promise, at the company’s press conference at MWC 2019.
“5G PowerSave is a comprehensive solution that – and this is a statement – we’re not going to launch any 5G phones which don’t give you all-day battery life on your smartphones,” Amon said.
PowerSave will come as standard with all phones featuring the new Snapdragon 855 processor, as well as the X50 and X55 modem, from the Xiaomi Mi 9 to the LG V50.
Related: 5G phones
This will apparently be made possible by a combination of a number of developments in industry-standard processes like discontinuous reception (aka DXR) – where, when in an area of poor reception, the network tells the phone to use more power to boost signal – and a number of “unique technologies” that Amon declined to explore further.
Power consumption will vary depending on your device and the network you’re using, but Amon was confident that the experience would be about the same as what you’d get with a gigabit LTE phone today.
We’ll reserve judgement, of course, until we get review samples in and can begin testing new phones on 5G as and when that’s available.
The first devices with Snapdragon X50 modems will go on sale soon, while phones featuring the more advanced X55 modem are expected to hit shelves later in 2019.
What do you think about 5G? Do you think that battery life will be able to keep up, or are you more worried about rinsing your data allowance by streaming 4K Netflix? Let us know @TrustedReviews.