Here at Computex in Taipei, Qualcomm announced that it’s teaming up with Lenovo on “Project Limitless,” the first 5G PC. It’s still really early days for the laptop, which was teased at Qualcomm’s press conference, and is pegged for an early 2020 release date.
The laptop uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx processor paired with a Snapdragon x55 5G modem with 7GBps transfer speeds. No other specs were announced.
In its current form, Project Limitless looks like one of Lenovo’s Yoga-series of convertible 2-in-1s, with a bend-back hinge and scallop-shaped chiclet keys. That design is subject to change between now and 2020, I was told.
I didn’t get to try too much out on the demo unit. Qualcomm was demonstrating YouTube video playback on the device. Because there isn’t a running 5G network here in Taipei, the company was using a Sub-6 callbox to get 5G between the 3 GHz and 6 GHz spectrums.
Like with premium Windows 10 on ARM devices, Qualcomm is promising multi-day battery life in real world usage.
The 5G benefit, however, may take some time to be used at its full capacity. There are limited 5G networks right now (in the United States, they’re only in Minneapolis and Chicago) with more rolling out this and next year , so those extremely fast download speeds may take time to actually get to the laptop, depending on where you live.
Besides Project Limitless, Qualcomm also showed me a reference design from Compal, an ODM here in Taiwan, for 8CX 5G laptops. It, too, has a convertible 2-in-1 design, and was made in white, but was not shown powered on.
