(Photo: Steven Winkelman/PCMag)
The Pixel 6 Pro packs a Samsung Exynos 5123 modem along with its Google-made Tensor processor. But you wouldn't know that from Google's Pixel announcement, where talk of basic connectivity was nowhere to be heard.
How do we know about the modem? The Pixel 6 Pro we're testing has baseband firmware with version "g5123b-92009-211008-B-7805583." The "5123" refers to the Samsung 5123 modem. The baseband firmware number tends to have the modem part number in it. For example, the Pixel 5's basebands start with "g7250," and 7250 is the internal part number for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 765 chipset.
While Samsung users in the rest of the world have seen this modem in their Galaxy S20 devices, this is the first time it's been seen in a major US phone. The 5123 appears to have similar capabilities to the Qualcomm X55 in the iPhone 12 and the US versions of the Galaxy S20 series. Yes, that's a year behind the X60 in other flagships, but as I explained two weeks ago, none of our carriers are using the new X60 features in a widespread way quite yet.
More than a year after Samsung released the S20, there's a shocking lack of analysis of Exynos 5123 performance. Plenty of articles compare Qualcomm's Snapdragon CPU performance with the Exynos 990, but I haven't been able to find a single one comparing X55 performance with the 5123. If you know of any tests, let me know me in the comments.
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Discussions of 5G, and of connectivity in general, were missing from the Pixel announcement event. Google didn't show Stadia cloud gaming or some complex videoconferencing scenario that would require a lot of bandwidth, didn't talk about the potential of Wi-Fi 6E, and didn't come up with new 5G-ready applications. The phrase "5G" appears only once in the description of Google's Pixel 6 Pro page, and it doesn't even get a sentence to itself. That's not to say the Pixel 6 doesn't have cool features, just that those features (turning phone trees into text, Snapchat) don't really require a strong modem or much of a network.
Some of this likely springs from the politics of not wanting to mention Samsung, both Google's (Android) customer and its (Pixel) competitor, as a supplier. But I think there's a bigger issue here.
Google needs to solve a privacy problem, and one solution is to make its devices less connected. There's a major backlash against big-data companies like Google and Facebook hoovering up everyone's data into huge, cloud-based data sets. So Google is putting as much AI as possible into its Pixel 6 phones, to let them do things like voice recognition, image analysis, and language translation without uploading all your raw data to its cloud.
This also solves a connectivity problem: if everything you're uploading to the cloud is compressed hashes of things, you don't need a lot of bandwidth. But a device designed to do as much on-device as possible is great for your privacy and for the budgets of people on limited data plans, but not so good for encouraging further 5G network rollouts.
The ultimate cloud company is pulling back from the cloud, making 5G a little less important. Still, I want to check out the performance of that Samsung modem.
What Else Happened in the Mobile World This Week?
I reviewed the Surface Duo 2. Weird device. Great radio though.
The latest "Andromeda" auction for C-Band didn't fail. AT&T is likely to get 40MHz of 5G nationwide out of this, which it needs.
The "Andromeda" 5G strain is extremely close to CBRS, though, which means that to work properly phones will need new band filters. Fortunately, Qualcomm just came out with a solution.
The new MacBook Pros, unsurprisingly, don't have built-in 4G or 5G. Here's why it'll come in 2024 or 2025.
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