This is Samsung's 5G smartphone prototype

Android Authority was at Qualcomm’s Tech Summit in Maui, Hawaii, where both Verizon and AT&T set up 5G networks for live demos during the event. If you have a 5G network, you obviously need a 5G-capable phone to run on it, and Samsung has stepped in to provide a live prototype.

We’ve seen 5G-capable prototypes in the past, but what makes Samsung’s particularly interesting is the unique Infinity-O display it’s sporting. The camera cutout is nested inside a corner-notch design, and we can only assume it’s there to hide what Samsung’s market-ready Infinity-O displays will look like. We have no idea if this form factor will even remotely resemble the Samsung Galaxy S10, but the general shape of the device looks quite a lot like the Samsung Galaxy S9.

Samsung tells us it used the prototypes to make video calls with effectively no latency at an extremely high resolution — a use case often used to highlight 5G technology. In the demo room, Samsung was simply streaming high quality video and playing it back on a TV through Dex.

This is almost definitely a coincidence, but there did happen to be a “10” stamped on a sticker on the back of the device. It’s likely that Samsung just used this to label their prototypes, but it made me laugh nevertheless.

Either way, a 5G prototype like this confirms Samsung does indeed have something in the works, which Verizon and AT&T have also confirmed.

This phone obviously won’t be coming to market in its current form, but it’s still fun to see what kind of strange form factors Samsung has been thinking up.