Oliver Haslam on December 5, 2019, 8:01 pm

5G iPhone Launch In 2020 Is ‘Priority Number One’ Says Qualcomm President

Apple and Qualcomm are working to get the iPhone into 5G mode next year, according to Qualcomm President, Cristiano Amon. Amon was speaking at the company’s Snapdragon Tech Summit, as reported by PCMag.

With Apple and Qualcomm now on speaking terms again following a nasty legal spat, they’re now working quickly to get 5G iPhones ready for next year.

Meeting that schedule is going to be tricky, so tricky that the iPhones won’t use Qualcomm’s RF front end, something that will make the phones less capable in terms of signal. It’s also possible that only some of the 2020 iPhones will feature the fancy mmWave technology that offers super fast speeds, too.

On the subject of meeting a tight deadline as is the case with the iPhone 2020 rollout, Amon said that Qualcomm and Apple may have rejoined the table later than they would have liked.

“We re-engaged probably later than both of us would like, and I think we’ve been working together to try to get as much as possible done, and take as much possible advantage of what they’ve done before so that we can actually launch a phone on schedule with 5G,” Amon said.

The pair signed a new multi-year agreement earlier this year which effectively put Intel out of the 5G modem game. Apple subsequently picked up Intel’s modem business for a cool $1 billion with the plan being to make modems in-house for future iPhones. 2020 will come too soon for that, however.

(Source: PCMag)