Samsung had a 5G smartphone prototype on display at CES and almost nobody noticed it

samsung 5g prototype phone ces 2019 2

Samsung had a 5G smartphone prototype on display at CES 2019.
It's the closest official look we have to future smartphones from Samsung that come with 5G compatibility.
A variant of Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S10 is said to come with 5G support.

Strolling innocently through Samsung's massive booth at CES 2019 in Las Vegas, I stumbled upon Samsung's 5G prototype smartphone.

There it was, a 5G smartphone prototype from the biggest mobile company in the world, with no fanfare or much interest from any other CES attendee around me. I almost started to believe that only I could see it.

To be clear, the prototype I saw was, indeed, just a prototype. It was the smartphone used to show off 5G capabilities when Verizon and Samsung announced earlier in December that a 5G phone will be coming in early 2019 during a Qualcomm event in Hawaii. I'd doubt that Samsung would brazenly display this device if it had any similarities to the upcoming Galaxy S10, of which one model is rumored to support 5G connectivity.

Still, it's the closest thing we've seen to an official 5G smartphone from Samsung at the moment.

Check out Samsung's 5G prototype smartphone:

There it is, casually hanging out at the far end of Samsung's 5G hardware display. You can barely see it.

Here's a closer look of the prototype of Samsung's vision of a 5G smartphone. If you were expecting 5G phones to look different, you could be set up for disappointment.

It looked like a perfectly operational unit with a working display, volume buttons, a power button, and even a Bixby button. It even had a case.

The phone's screen cycled through a canned demo that showcased some of the device's features and functions. None of the demos appeared to make use of wireless capabilities however, so it didn't provide much insight into what the super-fast 5G wireless data experience will actually be like.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider