Five 5G takeaways from Samsung’s new phones

Samsung on Thursday took the wraps off its new Galaxy S21 flagship phones. The gadgets are important because Samsung is the world’s largest maker of smartphones and has been the leading vendor for 5G devices. Plus, the Galaxy S-line of phones is Samsung’s premier offering.

Samsung’s latest phones feature all kinds of fancy technologies and functions – OLED screens, Snapdragon 888 CPUs, at least 8 GB of RAM and plenty of other acronyms – that have been exhaustively outlined by gadget-focused publications like The Verge and Cnet. However, the phones are also significant for the 5G industry for these five reasons:

1. They’re $200 cheaper than previous versions.

The initial batch of 5G phones from Samsung and others were searingly expensive. Indeed, most 5G smartphones during 2019 cost more than $1,000. Samsung itself pushed that ceiling up to $2,000 with its first Galaxy Fold.

During 2020, though, 5G phone prices began to fall back down to Earth. For example, the Google Pixel 4A 5G costs just $500.

That’s why Samsung’s new Galaxy prices are important: The S21 costs just $800, while the S21+ costs $1,000 and the S21 Ultra costs $1,200. Samsung previously charged $1,000, $1,200 and $1,400 for the S20, S20+ and S20 Ultra, respectively.

“Competitive pricing will play an integral role in shaping 5G development,” IDC analyst Sangeetika Srivastava said in a recent statement. “The COVID-19 crisis has influenced consumer behavior by tilting it toward more budget-friendly devices and narrowing the spend for essentials only.”

2. They support the C-band.

As PCMag reported, Samsung’s new phones support 5G in C-band spectrum for the US market. As the publication notes, the only FCC-certified phones that support this spectrum band are Samsung’s new Galaxy S21 phones and Apple’s new iPhone 12 phones.

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