5G SPECIAL - 1
Smart phones  are slowly moving from  connectivity to convergence
The new year should see  the first 5G handsets in India, offering a smooth mix of  IoT, AI and AR
From Vishnu Anand, recently in Shenzen, China
December, 16 2019: Remember the humbler days of feature phones? Those chocolate bars had just  two thing to do: make calls  and send text messages. Then colour screens came -- and  you could also listen to music and FM radio.   Soon, you could take photos and videos on-the-go. It took a decade for feature phones to become intelligent, 'touchy' and  and 'smart'.  Hand phones today have become  computing lifelines with the ability to read foreign languages, take  near-professional-quality pictures and seamlessly access  Internet. For the next  jump in smart phone innovation,  a few brands today,  are brainstorming  for crazy, but doable ideas, mostly centred around 5G.
At its annual Inno Day event in  Shenzen, China last week, leading handset maker  Oppo,  showcased its  plans to convert the smart phone into a central computing  hub for artificial intelligence, augmented reality, cloud computing and Internet of Things. Oppo calls it intelligent connectivity. Driven by 5G on the software side and design innovation in hardware, Oppo is teasing customers with sneak peaks into a suite of connectivity products from smart watches, AR glasses, smart headphones and a 5G CPE (customer premises equipment), essentially a voice enabled speaker of sorts. 
The underlying technologies are highly immersive and interactive, a signal that the next decade of smartphone innovation will move from connectivity to convergence. In technical terms, computing will move to the edge from the cloud.  This simply means your device will do more, know you better and predict your behaviour to give you not features, but experiences. 
Many of these  features  are already experienced by  customers in China and Korea because  large scale  5G  deployments have started in these countries.    Some 50 service providers  worldwide are  getting ready to offer 5G in 2020. Indian carriers are not there yet -- but have been quietly testing  and beefing up their networks.   The secret sauce that will  help them graduate to 5G,  is something called DSS or Dynamic Spectrum Sharing, a technology that allows them to leverage rather than ditch  the existing  4G frequencies they have been using. 
Earlier this month an Oppo handset -- the Reno 5G --   was used to make the world's  first  long distance  5G-quality call between  Bern, Switzerland  and Gold Coast, Australia,  using technology from Ericsson and Qualcomm.
The Oppo Reno 5G  and Xiaomi's Mi 10 are the first smart phones  to  harness the new  Snapdragon 865 processor specially created for  5G. The chip caters to high-end handsets. But what about the rest of us?   Qualcomm has simultaneously launched a  'lite'  5 G chip, the 765, with a slightly slower modem built-in -- and   Oppo has  announced the Reno3 Pro  to use this processor. So we can expect  5G phones at a broad spectrum of prices in the new year.  But be warned:  they will be working in 4G .... till  Airtel and  Idea-Vodafone and Jio launch  5G services
|That first  5G call underlines one thing: It takes multiple agencies to make 5G happen --which is why mobile brands are  ready to collaborate with competitors. While they understand that the industry needs to collectively move towards the next decade of mobile connectivity, they  think  disruptive design will differentiate them. Machines may eventually become smarter than humans but only humans have the perception of beauty (read design),  so  companies  will woo us with  technologies and products that will catapult us into a faster future.  Decidedly, 2020 looks promising as we await the zippy new experience of 5G.