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This exactly. mmWave is such an absurd expense for literally no return. I think it came out that basically they were forced to support it in order to otherwise be sold as a 5G device through Verizon, and that forced their hand. But $100 for a service that literally no one can use? Ridiculous.

I can't understand the series of events that have transpired where literally anyone in the infrastructure and network and spectrum teams at VZW have been excited about mmWave and think it's a worthwhile investment. The limitations on the technology make it functionally worthless. Its performance suffers depending on your HAND position. It's about as dumb as trying to transmit data to a cell phone over IR and about as practical. It feels like they landed the spectrum and figured they could make some claims about insane speeds, and then the reality around its limitations set in and the core technology doesn't have any way to get around them.

At the end of the day, mmWave, by its very nature, will not penetrate almost any surface. How anyone thought that meant it was a candidate for radio transmission on moving devices is completely beyond me.

Because it's one of the few things you can actually point at and be like "that's why you need a new phone!"

Same reason why Apple was all about that 5G during the iPhone 12 announcement.

Doesn't matter if it'll never be useful, all that matters is that the feature sheet lists it and a canned demo will show unreal speeds.

5G in general is important. It means compatibility for the future, access to more towers, and access to more frequencies. So sure, you need mmwave to get gigabits per second, but 5G without mmwave still has a good amount to show off and make sales with.

In Europe we hardly have proper LTE and HSCSD support outside main cities, I couldn't care less about 5G.

That depends entirely on what new towers are deployed with. If they keep trickling out LTE, then you can ignore 5G just fine. But if they leapfrog LTE and new deployments devote most of the frequencies to 5G, then you're probably going to want a 5G radio to have fewer gaps in coverage.

The article points out that it’s slower than the 4a, which is half the price. That’s ... less than great.

In most benchmarks they are basically within the error margin, but I have indeed seen a few where Pixel 5 does strangely poorly. I am definitely curious to know what's causing that, Pixel 5 has a slightly newer version of the same chipset (765G/Adreno 620 vs 730G/Adreno 618). The two best guesses I have is either the waterproofing really messes up with the thermals, or there's some unlying bug causing bad performance in those specific benchmarks.

That being said, in real-life use, unless you're playing some heavy games, phone devices are generally more memory bound than CPU bound in my experience, so the 2GB extra ram will go a long way.

Waterproofing or not, phones are almost always effectively hermetically sealed from a convection point of view and do not rely on convection in any form for cooling. I do not see how waterproofing would interfere with conducting heat away.

Maybe it forces a different internal layout?

The pixel 4a 5g uses the same cpu as the 5, does not have waterproofing, and has the same benchmark speeds as the 5. I think the layouts are different too, based on the fact that the 4a 5g is larger than the 5.

Pixel 5 owner here, I am disapointed at that metric, but I am not disappointed at the speed of my phone. I can see how that would cause others to second guess a Pixel 5 purchase or have buyer's remorse upon learning that.

It isn't in the metric that really matters for day-to-day usage which is disk IO.

The 5 & 4A have the same GPU and the 5 has a slightly faster CPU. Unclear why the benchmark scores are what they are, possibly a worse thermal profile with the 5, but if you're not gaming the faster storage will have far more impact.

I'm fortunate enough to have needed a Pixel 5 _in addition_ to a Pixel 4a, results are nonsensical imo, 5 is _definitely_ more buttery

I think this is the real point; 90hz is way more important than CPU speed in making it feel like an upgrade.

Is it correct to say that mmWave is like 5G++?

(For those of us that don't know)

It’s like 5G part 1; It’s not really an iteration, but a subset.

The important part to understand is that mmWave is really short range and is blocked by walls, windows, and sheets of paper. Phones with it may need to have "windows" to let the signal make it through the phone case to the antenna.

So it basically works outdoors in very busy cities where it's worth it to put an antenna every few hundred feet: Most Americans will never actually benefit from it. It won't work in their houses or anywhere not very dense urban.

Some Verizon stores actually put a mmWave antenna physically inside the showroom so you can see the performance... but it won't work when you step out the door.

Yup.

mmWave will make a big difference for the likes of stadiums and theaters. Places with huge crowds. A feature of the high frequency is it doesn't travel far which limits cross talk and allows you to pack in more antennas to serve more people.

How often Telecoms will want to deploy it is a different matter. My guess is you'll see it go up most often in places where companies want to optimize customer experiences. Likely as a partnership with the various telcos. For example, I could see the likes of Disney deploying it across disneyworld and disneyland.

It's an interesting application, but with Covid-19, it may be a while before places with huge crowds are happening again.

Oh, totally. It's VERY apparent that 5g was developed for a pre-covid world :D

Corona is not going to hamstring the world forever, that’s just some authoritarian fantasy.

I won't be forever certainly. But it's entirely possible that large-scale gatherings like that will be discouraged for at least the timeframe of the next generation of phones, i.e. 1-2 years.

Look at the areas where the epidemic is considered controlled. The first thing they do to show it is organize large scale gatherings, like China with large dance festivals and New Zealand with sports events.

I guess... but like, that's what Wi-Fi AX is supposed to cater to. Apart from voice traffic, which isn't extreme, it's hard to imagine why cellular (which is carrier-specific) would be preferred over Wi-Fi deployment. If the cell towers are in the facility, they need to provide the fiber backhaul either way.

Doesn't 5G have the ability to be carrier agnostic, so that multiple carriers can be on the same antennae? Or am I sniffing glue again?

Nope, carriers buy broadcasting bands. Phones are designed to be able to take in and process the various frequencies that all the carriers use.

Whenever there is a bandwidth auction, you'll have the potential of your phones not having access to your new network's bands.

How we've been handling this is that new purchases often go to newer tech. However, there has been some cannibalism of really old bands (For example, taking a 2g band and turning it into a 5g band). That happens per carrier.

3G is already in the process of being shut down.

Which makes it a little annoying how long they kept making phones that had 4G support but still depended on 3G for calls. Still, it seems like we're on track to get those bands reclaimed at a significantly better pace than 2G.

The major difference is that for wifi, you need to setup your connection to whatever wifi network is provided. With your cell data service, that happens automatically for you. You don't need to go in and explicitly join some guest network and sign their ToS.

Maybe if there was some "cell->wifi" standard that could happen, but I'm somewhat doubtful about the benefits there. You'd also have to be super careful, for the same reason you wouldn't really want to join a random open network.

LTE WiFi offload takes care of securely transiting voice over untrusted networks (like your home network) to the telcos core network using IPSec.

5G has a bunch of frequencies in the same range as wifi, too. They can handle a good chunk of density.

The WiFi industry is working on a new "cell->wifi" standard called OpenRoaming. Pixel phones turned on OpenRoaming support with Android 11.

So it basically only works if you're sitting or walking outside? I'm assuming it wouldn't work if you're in a car/bus (unless maybe a convertible/tour bus?)

I imagine it would work just the same as wifi on buses currently. There will be a mmWave access point inside the bus which will use something else (maybe a cell backhaul?) for it's connection.

As someone mentioned in another comment, the best use case for mmWave is places with very high density such as concerts, sports stadiums, etc where current cell networks and wifi seriously struggle. You don't have channel congestion if the waves can't make it through the walls in the venue.

My guess is that it will be good for high-density outdoor environments like stadia.

Hopefully some other useful applications will present themselves. Cruise ships, maybe? Airport terminals?

Took me a second, but the arent meant "stadia" as in the plural of "stadium", not google's gaming service.

You forgot to add that the audio quality is sub par with its below the display speaker that makes it unbalanced from the bottom speaker having weaker output, some displays have a slight space between the body and no one can tell how that'll turn out in a year and CPU is throttled on top of being an average one.

Compared to 4a (not the 5G one), you get better refresh rate (90Hz not 120Hz), more RAM (but 4a already has 6GB), more battery, more accurate fingerprinting sensor, waterproof, wireless charge, almost the same camera quality, lost audio jack port, got slightly heavier and a better design and tries to be a higher class than 4a with its price tag when 5G doesn't mean anything for most which sound like incremental updates that should be set with a similar price tag.

> default storage to 128gb

You mean only storage. Even the $400 iPhone SE has multiple storage options, maxing at 256gb for $550.

At least they had the decency to not offer a 64GB option.

>if you don't care for 90hz display, wireless charging and waterproofing, 4a is definitely a fantastic deal at half the price

It also misses the ultra wide angle camera, doesn't it?

I think it's perfect mid-high device without 5G.

you don't understand.

5G is a trojan horse.

5G is about peer-to-peer unblockable communication.

It's the way benign and dumb devices can use phones to phone home.

Everywhere that phones go will increase google's data reach.