One of the biggest challenges facing us today with 5G is the increased form factor that devices will have to take on. The Samsung Galaxy S10+ is an example of this, where the 5G edition is bigger because of the mmWave antennae and the bigger battery required to power 5G connectivity. The LG V50 5G and the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 5G both also support it, though they're still quite big devices. The Nubia Mini 5G was announced at the company's press conference the other day, and it's the world's smallest 5G smartphone. It's powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 paired with a Snapdragon X50 modem and 6GB of RAM.

Nubia Mini 5G

Early, early software

The Nubia Mini 5G is most notable for how early the software that's installed on it is. It's pretty much stock AOSP (including the default wallpaper), with some basic applications installed and not much else. Nubia is known for having a pretty heavily modified variant of Android, so the Nubia Mini 5G, right now, is a far cry from that. Obviously, that will change in the future as the company works on refining it for the market. This is a very early model and is more of a proof-of-concept than anything else.

There's not much to actually show here, other than the fact this smartphone exists and does work. The software is incredibly barebones and it's obvious that the company has somewhat rushed this out the door to show what they're currently working on. That's not really a bad thing, it's just something to note that it will be a long time before this product is finished and readily available.

The Nubia Mini 5G is a smartphone that is really hard to get information about at the moment. The only information readily available is what was on display, which wasn't much at all. It has a single 48MP Sony camera sensor on the back along with a fingerprint scanner and LED flash. It's pretty barebones, but it's already giving us an idea of what we can expect from future 5G smartphones. If anything, the Nubia Mini 5G shows us the start of the development process and what companies start working with once they have a prototype built.