T-Mobile announced today that on Friday, June 28, its 5G network will go live in six markets. It will also be launching its first 5G smartphone – the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G.
As far as the markets go, T-Mobile will be launching in Atlanta, Cleveland, Dallas, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and New York. With many more cities coming later this year. T-Mobile does also have 5G coverage maps available for those cities, so you can see where exactly T-Mobile has 5G coverage. Since it is using mmWave or millimeter wave, it isn’t going to be covering the entire city at once. Simply take a look at the New York City map, not even all of Manhattan is covered with 5G yet.
Combined with mmWave, T-Mobile is also using Multi-band Dual Connectivity across its 5G markets. What this does is it integrates mmWave 5G with its existing 4G LTE network for better speeds.
T-Mobile, like the other carriers that have launched 5G, doesn’t have it everywhere. And that means that when you move out of a 5G area, that you’re going to fall back onto 4G LTE. Luckily, the Galaxy S10 5G does also support 4G LTE and all of T-Mobile’s latest LTE technologies, so you are also going to get some pretty fast speeds on the Galaxy S10 5G, even when it is connected to a 4G LTE network.
It shouldn’t be surprising to see the Galaxy S10 5G connect to 4G LTE networks. If you think back, about 10 years ago when 4G LTE was just starting to roll out around the world. Many of those smartphones launched then were also 4G LTE smartphones that supported 3G and most also supported 2G. So that when you did go into an area that didn’t have 4G LTE, you weren’t out of luck. It’ll be the same with 5G, as it should be.
The Samsung Galaxy S10 5G is the beefiest Galaxy S10 that Samsung has made this year. It has a pretty large 6.7-inch Quad HD+ AMOLED display, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 chipset, with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. There is also a 512GB model available too. There are also six cameras on this phone, with three on the front and another three on the back. But what is most important here is the battery. There’s a whopping 4500mAh capacity battery inside the Galaxy S10 5G that is going to be needed, since 5G isn’t great on battery just yet. Since it is still very new technology. Anyone remember how 4G LTE was on the first 4G LTE smartphones? Yeah, not too good.
T-Mobile will start selling the Galaxy S10 5G on Friday, June 28. It will be available online and in select stores in the six markets where 5G is launching this week. Like the other carriers that have launched the Galaxy S10 5G, it will also be priced pretty high – at $1299. If you want to pay for it installments, it’ll be $549 down and $31.25 per month for 24 months. Basically you’re paying for a phone and then still paying $31.25 per month for that phone.