HTC wants to play a bigger role in the deployment of 5G, but not necessarily solely when it comes to new smartphones. At Mobile World Congress 2019, the company has taken the wraps off of a new so-called “5G hub,” which can connect to 5G networks, act as an Android tablet, and more.
The new device boasts all the specs you would expect from a flagship phone in 2019 — but it’s not a phone. Instead, it’s more of a smart display aimed at things like 4K video streaming, low-latency gaming, and acting as a 5G hotspot. The device is compatible with the Sprint network, though it’ll likely come to other networks as time goes on.
Under the hood, the new HTC 5G hub offers pretty awesome specs. You’ll get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 processor, coupled with 4GB of Ram and 32GB of storage, though if you find that it doesn’t offer quite enough storage for you, there is a MicroSD card slot. The display on the device sits in at five inches, with a resolution of 720 x 1,280 — meaning that even if you can get 4K streaming, there’s not much point in doing so straight to the device itself. The device also offers Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity and a battery capacity of 7.660mAh — though it remains to be seen exactly how long that will last.
The hub seems to take place of a new phone with 5G connectivity — and we’re not exactly sure what the point of it is. It’s nice to see that HTC is thinking about 5G and the implications of it, but we’re not so sure that an Android tablet with 5G connectivity is necessarily the way to go. Having said that, we do expect HTC to adopt 5G in its smartphones in the near future, especially considering the fact that the company has now released at least one 5G-capable device.
Apart from the aforementioned specs, the HTC 5G hub comes with Android 9.0 out of the box, and we expect that it will heavily integrate with Google Assistant. According to HTC, the device will be available in the second quarter of 2019 — though we’re not currently sure exactly how much the HTC 5G hub will cost.
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