Las Vegas: The scepticism about faster adoption of 5G technology across the globe has been put to rest with the new technology expected to surpass the "conservative" target of 200 million 5G devices set prior to 2020, Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon said at a company event at CES in Las Vegas.
He said that now over 340 operators were investing in 5G globally, including over 45 with 5G already deployed, and Qualcomm was expecting over 200 million 5G smartphones "just one category of devices" to be shipped over the year.
Amon said that the electric growth of the new technology would ensure that by 2022, the number of shipped 5G smartphones will be over 750 million, and 5G connections should beat 1 billion by 2023, two years faster than 4G hit that number.
The company now estimates 2.8 billion 5G connections by 2025. The revolution will be supported by Qualcomm's snapdragon 8- and 7- series chips.
Qualcomm also co-announced launch of Lenovo's Yoga 5G, which they billed as the world's first 5G PC. This has taken the industry by surprise as it would now become the first 5G PC to be in the market ahead of competitors such as Dell, HP and others who also have announced similar products for a launch at a later date.
All of these initial 5G laptops notably appear to be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X55 modem, regardless of whether they're using Intel or Qualcomm CPUs.
Lenovo chose the Snapdragon 8cx chipset for Yoga 5G, which converts from a laptop to a tablet as the user prefers. On the hardware side, it promises 24-hour battery life, a 14-inch display, Dolby Atmos, and both a fingerprint scanner and IR camera for security. An Adreno 680 GPU should provide ample graphics horsepower despite requiring no cooling fan.
The chipmaker also introduced a new car-to-cloud services platform, as well as a new reference platform to advance Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology.
