LTE-A

Qualcomm had already promised its top-of-the-range Snapdragon 820 chip – expected to be used in next year’s flagship Android smartphones and cellular tablets – will boost battery-life and offer great improvements to photos. Now the company says we can also expect much faster LTE-Advanced connections, and smarter, faster charging.

The Snapdragon 820 will increase maximum LTE download speeds by a third, from 450Mbps to 600Mbps. Maximum upload speeds will double to 150Mbps – currently viewed as an impressive download speed. And speeds could be even higher thanks to support for the as yet unofficial LTE-U standard … 
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5G could even make Google Fiber look slow …

Early tests of Verizon’s 5G technology show that it can achieve connection speeds 30-50 times faster than 4G/LTE – above the speeds offered by Google Fiber’s gigabit wired broadband. Even better, the company expects to have “some level of commercial deployment” by 2017, some three years earlier than expected, reports CNET.

To put that speed difference into perspective, the movie Guardians of the Galaxy would take around six minutes to download over a good LTE connection – while 5G would have it downloaded to your device in just 15 seconds … 
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While it was rumored that LG would be the first to launch a current-generation smartphone with a fingerprint sensor, with the forthcoming iPhone 5S widely expected to be second in line, it appears Korean company Pantech has beaten both of them to it with the new Vega LTE-A.

As the name suggests, the handset also supports the new faster-than-4G LTE-Advanced standard, the second one to do so after Samsung’s S4 LTE-A …

There had been rumors that the LG G2, due for launch tomorrow, would have a fingerprint sensor based on photos of the rear shell … 
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