The president of Qualcomm, Cristiano Amon, made the announcement during his opening speech, claiming that the 22 global companies were “committed to 5G in 2019” using the Snapdragon X50 modem, which is expected to be available to manufacturers along with the flagship still to announce. Successor to the Snapdragon 845 chipset.
Sony, OnePlus and Motorola are among the leading manufacturers that apparently work on 5G phones for next year, along with LG, HTC and HMD, the company that currently manufactures Nokia phones. The main Chinese brands, such as Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and Asus, have also committed to the new networking technology.
In addition to the manufacturers shown in the image above, Amon also confirmed that Samsung and ZTE have committed to 5G devices that use the Qualcomm modem, just like Google, so expect a 5G Pixel 4.
Amon continued to suggest that the first wave of these 5G devices should be in the hands of consumers in the second quarter of 2019, so between April and June, and predicted that we would even see some manufacturers launching two 5G flagships in 2019, one in the first half of the year and one in the second.
OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei also appeared at the event and promised that OnePlus would be "the first, or one of the first" to launch a 5G commercial device with Qualcomm, while confirming that the OnePlus 7 would support 5G.
5G promises significantly faster loading and unloading speeds, potentially comparable to domestic fiber connections, but will require large investments in infrastructure before the connections are actually available to consumers. That means that the first wave of 5G phones probably doesn't have 5G networks to connect at the beginning.
They are also likely to be a few mm thicker than current smartphones thanks to the requirements of the new 5G antennas, but it will probably only take a couple of generations of phones before we return to the current form factors.
Qualcomm's announcement includes most major phone manufacturers that use Qualcomm processors, but as a result it excludes some large companies that primarily use their own chips: we don't know when to expect Huawei or Apple 5G phones.
The announcement comes as part of the Qualcomm 4G / 5G summit, where last year it predicted that it would be able to deliver 5G phones in 2019, proving it is good.
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