China Telecom Carriers And Smartphone Vendors Gear Up For 5G

With the arrival of 5G commercialization, China-based telecom carriers and smartphone vendors are expanding their services and releasing new products in pursuit of new business opportunities.

After announcing their respective 5G plans in October, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom together had seen a total of nearly 10 million local pre-subscribers for their 5G plans by the end of October with nearly 60% of them choosing China Mobile, and the rest split equally between China Unicom and China Telecom, according to market observers citing figures from Chinese media.

China Mobile is planning to expand its 5G subscriber base to 70 million in 2020 with the number of connected smart home devices in China to reach 50 million units and sales of 5G smartphones to break 100 million units.

China-based smartphone brands including Huawei, Vivo, Xiaomi, Oppo and ZTE have already released 5G smartphones in the domestic market. Since 5G smartphones are expected to be able to support heavy-workload applications including streaming Ultra HD (UHD) multimedia contents, VR/AR and cross-platform IoT connection, phone vendors are working to improve their devices’ computing performance, power consumption, heat dissipation, screens and camera functions.

To accelerate the penetration of their 5G smartphones, Vivo has priced its new 5G smartphone at around NT$20,000 (US$655) and one from Xiaomi is as low as NT$15,000. Xiaomi is also looking to release up to 10 new 5G smartphones in 2020, targeting different consumer sectors.

Many China-based second-tier smartphone vendors are also gearing up for 5G and are currently waiting for related chips and technologies to become mature. These vendors are looking to release their first 5G smartphones as soon as in the second quarter of 2020 and their entry to the market will boost demand for 5G smartphones at the NT$8,000-15,000 price range.

Research firm Canalys has recently estimated that 5G smartphones’ penetration will reach 13.2% in 2020 and by 2023, shipments of 5G smartphones will be able to surpass those of 4G ones to become the mainstream in the market. It also believes that game streaming, multimedia content streaming and VR will become the three major applications for the 5G consumer market.

Because of these applications’ high power consumption and heat generation, higher battery capacity and better heat dissipation capability will be challenges to product and component developers.

Fast-charging solutions including Qualcomm’s QuickCharge, Huawei’s Fast Charge Protocol and Super Charge Protocol and Oppo’s Super VOOC, have also become popular among smartphone vendors.

Qualcomm’s QuickCharge can now support up to 28W, while Huawei’s Super Charge Protocol is able to go up to 40W. Oppo’s Reno Ace smartphone released recently that supports its SuperVOOC 2.0 can be fast charged with 65W, allowing the device to be fully charged within half an hour.

In response to the fast-charging technologies, Xiaomi and Lenovo have already released their 65W chargers, while ZMI and APE have both demonstrated at the Global Resources tradeshow their 65W small-form-factor chargers developed with their gallium nitride technologies.

For smartphones’ cameras, vendors have also been pushing modules with more advanced resolutions. Realme’s smartphones and Xiaomi’s new Redmi are now both equipped with cameras supporting up to 64-megapixle resolution. Xiaomi’s new CC9 Pro will feature a five-camera lens design with the main lens having 108-megapixel resolution and using Samsung Electronics’ ISOCell Bright HMX photosensitive component and in-house developed image software.―Digitimes