Category: Reviews
Samsung Galaxy S7, the first 4×4 MIMO smartphone
Samsung’s six month old flagship, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, has just become a first of it’s kind LTE smartphone. T-Mobile users recently received the September Over-The-Air (OTA) update which appeared to be a routine security patch with some enhancements to Samsung Cloud backup, but it included a hidden gem. The OTA update also included a baseband firmware (G935TUVU4APIA) update which enables 4-Way Receive Diversity, as well as the ability to process four independent spatial streams, 4×4 MIMO. This milestone carries a significant weight in the world of mobile telephony and crowns the Samsung Galaxy S7 as the first commercially available 4×4 […]
LG V20, The First AWS-3 Capable Smartphone
Earlier than expected and without the fanfare, the first AWS-3 capable smartphone has finally arrived. During the obligatory visit to the FCC Office of Engineering and Technology, the filing reveals that the LG V20, powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 supports Band 66. In addition, the FCC application confirms the Three-Way Downlink Carrier Aggregation support, and we are hoping to see Over-the-Air update enabling Higher Order Modulation at least on the T-Mobile variant. T-Mobile is the only U.S. mobile operator with DL 256 QAM and UL 64 QAM commercially deployed across the macro layer, and our early tests […]
Making Sense of Sprint’s Announcement of 3-Way Carrier Aggregation on LG G5
There seems to be quite a bit of confusion around advanced LTE capabilities of many popular commercial smartphones. Many smartphones are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810/808 with X10 modem, or Snapdragon 820 with X12 modem, paired with Qualcomm’s WTR3925 transceiver. This combo enables a multitude of advanced LTE features, but it’s ultimately up to the phone manufacturers to deliver the full network capability to their products. The X12 modem found in the Snapdragon 820 powered devices is capable of achieving speeds of up to 600Mbps on the downlink (Cat 12), and 150Mbps on the uplink (Cat 13). […]