This is the prototype of the phone OnePlus 5G

It may have been concealed in a thick plastic case and enclosed in a plastic cube, but at the MWC 2019, OnePlus introduced for the first time to the public a prototype of its first 5G phone. The device was connected to a local 5G base station with a mmWave connection, a 5G variant that focuses on a high data rate at the expense of the range. In recent days, the company recently confirmed via a Finnish carrier that it planned to launch it in the second quarter of this year.

In addition to showing what was happening on the device screen, OnePlus did not share too many new details on the handset, except that it was an entirely new device rather than upgrading an existing phone. However, the company said the device could reach a maximum speed of 500 Mbps, although the demo content (an HD stream at 60 frames per second) only uses about 15 Mbps. It also appeared that the screen of the device did not have a notch, even if this screen could have been masked for the purposes of this demonstration.

Photo of Jon Porter / The Verge

Previously, OnePlus had confirmed that the phone would be equipped with a Snapdragon 855 processor and its CEO said it would probably cost between $ 200 and $ 300 more than 4G equivalents.

The content broadcast on the 5G device was a live stream of Ace Combat 7 provided by Shadow, a cross-platform cloud game service. Although we could not play a game using the phone's touch screen, we received an Xbox One controller connected to the phone via Bluetooth. The game itself was streamed directly from the cloud from a server in Amsterdam.

Since the Spanish 5G network is not yet widely available, the 5G part of the connection was limited to a small mmWave base station installed on the Qualcomm stand. From this base station, the traffic then passed through a more traditional Internet network to the cloud-based server.

This configuration meant that there were many variables that affected the speed of the connection. Whether it was the controller's Bluetooth connection or the fact that the phone was communicating with a remote server over a substantially non-5G network, the game itself was lagging behind. I was pressing on an analog controller and half a second later, the aircraft on the screen responded. Playing a full PC game on a mobile was an innovative proof of concept, but the demonstration did not show how 5G could make it viable.

In the end, the event raised some uncomfortable problems with the realities of the first deployments of 5G. Without widespread support from telecom operators, the network will still contain numerous bottlenecks that will limit its potential speed. Then, since services like Shadow were originally designed to run on 4G networks, they are unlikely to want to rely too much on the kind of speeds that the 5G is capable of. I do not doubt that the connection to 70 Mbps required for a 4K game stream will one day be possible, but we are not there yet.