When can I buy a 5G phone and how much will it be?

Superfast 5G mobile broadband sounds exciting, but there’s a major drawback: we’ll need to buy new phones. Will the extra expense be worth it and when will we be able to buy one?
To benefit from superfast mobile, due for launch over the next couple of years, we’ll all need to buy new phones.
And as we know with all new technologies, the first models won’t come cheap.
The next generation of phones will need a much more complex antenna, a whole new chipset or brain, and a way of managing the extra energy richer 5G services will gobble up.
Much of the base engineering is solved, says Scott Petty, Vodafone UK’s chief technology officer. Now engineers are working on miniaturisation and how to scale up manufacturing to keep costs down, he says.
But with 5G-compatible phones likely to start selling from “around $600-$700 (£458-£534)”, according to David McQueen from ABI Research – Samsung, Apple and Huawei prices will be “much higher”, he says – will we bother to fork out the extra cash?
This depends on how impressed we are with the new generation of services, says Mr Petty.
“We think 5G will kick off another wave of innovation that we haven’t seen in the last three or four years,” he says, something akin to the shift from clunky physical keyboard-based models to those with high-definition touchscreens.
“The smartphone will be acting as a communication hub for wearables,” he predicts, with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) benefiting most from the faster streaming speeds and lower latency (delay).

This should reduce the feeling of nausea many people feel experiencing VR on slower phones, he says.
But while handset makers are racing to be first to market, they also don’t want to launch 5G handsets before the new networks have been rolled out – a mistake they made with 4G much to consumers’ annoyance.
US mobile maker Motorola is coming out with a 5G add-on for its modular Moto Z3 smartphone in early 2019.
“We wanted to be first to market, and we wanted to learn a little about 5G frequencies,” says Doug Michau, Motorola’s director of production operations in North America.
The challenge, he says, “has re-energised our engineering base here at Motorola”.
But the 5G module is slightly bigger than the smartphone itself, housing a 5G-only modem, several antennae, and extra battery capacity to power them, says Ian Cutress, who writes for hardware review website AnandTech.
And it will be available only to customers of the Verizon network in the US, he adds.
“My guess for the first smartphone launch – after the Motorola add-on – would be from either OnePlus or Sony,” says ABI Research’s Mr McQueen.