Should You Buy 5G This Year?

The simple answer is, “no.”   But why not?

Yes, 5G is the latest and greatest with speeds expected to blow your mind.  But at this point, the networks are barely existent, present only in a few cities. Even then, they only work well in certain blocks, and even then, you need line of sight, and even then, you will still have LTE upload speeds.

You may be thinking you should just get a 5G anyway because you’re due for an upgrade, and you don’t want to be the last to the party.  But please, don’t do it. Like most things in the tech world, when new technology is first released, it’s got a helluva lot of bugs to work out.  And this will be no exception, as the first generation of phones that use the new technology will probably/definitely be kind of, well, bad.

Right now these phones are big, battery-sucking, inefficient monsters. If you’re too young to remember when computers took up an entire room, rather than the corner of your desktop or even handheld, Google it and you’ll see what we’re talking about.

Now, having said that, this year might be a little different since the $1,400 Samsung Galaxy S10 5G does look pretty decent. But even if it’s great, you’ll still be stuck with a phone that costs a ton of money to access a network that is only getting off the ground.

Even if a miracle happens and the networks spread faster than anyone expects, it’s likely that the modem inside your phone won’t be nearly as good as the second- or third-generation modems that are coming next year and the year after that. Qualcomm makes all of the 5G modems for phones in the US right now, and it’s announcing new modems almost as fast as it’s shipping current ones.

So be patient.  Your 5G time is coming.

—
Photo Credit: sdecoret / Shutterstock.com