Samsung’s first 5G smartphone

• Samsung had a 5G smartphone prototype on display at CES 2019.
• It’s the closest official look we have to future smartphones from Samsung that come with 5G compatibility.
• A variant of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S10 is said to come with 5G support.

Strolling innocently through Samsung’s massive booth at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, I stumbled upon Samsung’s 5G prototype smartphone.

There it was, a 5G smartphone prototype from the biggest mobile company in the world, with no fanfare or much interest from any other CES attendee around me. I almost started to believe that only I could see it.

To be clear, the prototype I saw was, indeed, just a prototype. It was the smartphone used to show off 5G capabilities when Verizon and Samsung announced earlier in December that a 5G phone will be coming in early 2019 during a Qualcomm event in Hawaii. I’d doubt that Samsung would brazenly display this device if it had any similarities to the upcoming Galaxy S10, of which one model is rumored to support 5G connectivity.

Still, it’s the closest thing we’ve seen to an official 5G smartphone from Samsung at the moment.