Add-on to come next year, at unknown price. It's the existing, not very impressive $480 Lenovo-Motorola Z3 and a promise of an add-on with a Qualcomm X50 modem. As you can see in the picture, the module is designed to snap on.
Ted Rappaport promises 5G phones by Xmas, but the quantity will be limited. The industry expectation has been "some" production units in the first half but quantities would be severely limited until the second half.
Verizon's suggestion these will be readily available early in the year is surprising. The whole 5G schedule has already been pulled up by a year, an extraordinary achievement in an almost unbelievably complicated product.
Modular, upgradeable phones like this have been around for a long time. They've never found much of a market. You generally take a performance hit if you only upgrade part of the phone. New phone prices kept coming down; if you needed a new function you probably bought a new phone.
A brilliant pr move calling this a 5G phone when it can't do 5G.
