Qualcomm announces first ever 5G test and New Snapdragon Chip 636

Qualcomm first announced a modem that could test 5G connectivity on a mobile device a year ago, but recently Qualcomm has announced that the company was able to conduct 5G connectivity tests on a mobile device using this modem, the tests were conducted using the X50 5G modem with 28GHz millimeter wave frequency band.

Qualcomm claims that the modem successfully displayed speeds in Gigabits during the tests and it is capable of 5Gbps speeds after the full 5G development.

Additionally, Qualcomm has also announced its first 5G smartphone reference design, the company will use this to test various 5G devices such as 5G modems, Radios, and Networks with smartphone makers by next year or two, the companies are already preparing to launch 5G enabled smartphones by the first half of 2019.

The reference design is a device that is 9mm thick and has an edge-to-edge display like other smartphones in the market. Moreover, Qualcomm has also announced a handful of components for device makers which will make it easier to support T-Mobile’s new 600MHz spectrum which is currently in the deployment phase.

Currently, only one smartphone LG V30 can support the 600MHz spectrum, Qualcomm is making it easier for other phones to support the spectrum probably by the end of this year or early next year.

Additionally, Qualcomm has announced another successor of its Snapdragon series, the new Snapdragon 636 processor for midrange smartphones. The 636 actually succeeds the previous 630, though the 630 chip is quite new and just started showing up in the phones a few months ago with incredibly performance improvement by 40 percent, the new chip is 14nm which is little lower than Snapdragon 835 which is 10nm chip, lower number in chip represents better performance and power.

Snapdragon 630 supports up to 24-megapixel cameras, ultrawide FHD+ displays and up to 600Mbps LTE. Qualcomm says it will start shipping the new chip to customers by the beginning of November.