Qualcomm, Lenovo team up for 1st 5G Snapdragon laptop

Taipei, May 28 (IANS) Amid the ongoing trade tensions between the US and China, US-based chip-maker Qualcomm and Chinese computer-maker Lenovo have teamed up to introduce the first 5G laptop, powered by Snapdragon.

Code-named "Project Limitless", the 5G-enabled PC would be "the world's first 7nm platform purpose-built for PCs that offers 5G connectivity", TechCrunch quoted the companies as describing the device on Monday. 

The laptop would run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform, which supports both 5G as well as 4G connections and has a battery that Qualcomm claims can last for several days per charge. 

The platform would put to use the Snapdragon X55 5G modem, which has download speeds of up to 2.5 Gbps.

The release date and pricing details of "Project Limitless" have not been revealed as yet, the report added. 

Qualcomm and Lenovo made the announcement at the Computex press conference held in Taipei, Taiwan. 

The companies announced their pairing despite US President Donald Trump's decision to scrutinize trade relations between the two countries due to security concerns. 

On May 15, Trump effectively banned Chinese tech major Huawei with a national security order following which Qualcomm, along with Google, Microsoft, Intel and ARM, put restrictions on businesses with Huawei.

Settlement status of the US-China trade war remains unclear as of now but Qualcomm's withdrawal from Huawei's manufacturing could greatly affect the Chinese company's 5G ambitions.

Currently, South Korea, China, Japan, Australia and the US are leading with 5G large-scale mass deployment.

While China is expected to represent 40 per cent of global 5G connections by 2025, India is yet to allocate 5G spectrum to operators even for 5G trial of use cases.

India is targeting 2020 for 5G rollout.