Power hungry, low coverage, and heavier.
No doubt plenty of the clueless will be queuing up to buy this latest piece of shiny.
But not me.
With the standalone 5G spec (3GPP Release 15) nailed down in June, it was only a matter of time before the first phone was formally announced. And as expected, it isn't a phone at all, but an addon that clamps to the back of an expandable Motorola phone. Verizon has earned the bragging rights to be the first to deliver …
Now if only they'd make 3G phones last almost a full working day before they run out of battery. That'd be nice.
Sigh, oh the good old days where a phone would last a week or so. Not that they got used for BitCoin mining in those days...
Apple conned the world into thinking that battery life didn't matter, just a few hours would do. That was an impressive feat, and they've made a ton of cash as a result. Of course, Apple also at various times didn't seem to think that phones should be able to work properly on a cellular network, or when held by human hands...
At least there's some manufacturers that still think a solid day's usage without a top up is a worthy goal. My BlackBerry Motion can easily do 2 whole days no problems at all.
Good old Claude Shannon pointed out that it takes a certain amount of energy to get a bit of information to travel from A to B. 2G, 3G and 4G have been steadily marching towards that limit, and there can't be much more room for improvement. 4G uses quite a lot of processing already to get the most out of the channels that are available, I wonder just how much 5G uses? I guess that's why it's costing network operators quite a lot of money...
Whilst your point is valid for a bit of information at a given frequency, there is plenty of room for improvement across frequencies as the restrictions at this point are mostly regulatory than physical.
My physics isn't up to scratch enough to understand how close mobile phone frequency quanta are to the discrete physical limits imposed by the quantum state jumps in the actual EM photons. If indeed that is actually a thing, I presume most of the non-frequency spread solutions are well tried at this point.
5G doesn't get you any closer to the Shannon limit. It has the same maximum bits/Hz as the most recent version of LTE, so it isn't making more efficient use of spectrum at all. The only advantage over LTE it has is reduced latency - which is a good thing, but it isn't getting you any more bandwidth.
The promises of huge bandwidth from 5G come from all the new spectrum that is being opened up for it on higher frequencies, as high as 39 GHz. AFAIK there's no reason LTE couldn't use those higher frequencies, but since those high frequencies are much less useful for voice (you'd constantly lose connection while walking as you passed a tree or building) it makes sense to dedicate them to 5G with its advantage of reduced latency.
In the linked article it is a bit of a fantasy to say 3 GB an hour for HD video. My movie streaming service lets me download a full HD 2 hour film for 1.5 GB so more like 750 MB per hour.
I think 5G will come in fairly slowly. Users value coverage just as much as speed. We need to get 4 G coverage up. I imagine Three will eventually be allowed to merge with O2 to form three main providers which will reduce the costs for the operators.