UWB stands for ultra-wideband, a wireless technology that uses radio waves to accurately measure the distance between objects. Samsung started offering it on its flagships starting with the model Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. It can also be used as a virtual car key and is also the heart of Samsung SmartTag+ and SmartTag2 smart locators. Here's everything you need to know about her.
What is UWB?
UWB can be thought of as a "turbo" version of the Bluetooth wireless standard. The Bluetooth LE standard is not ideal for location sensing due to latency typically exceeding 3ms, but with UWB the latency is less than 1ms. In addition, UWB has more than three times the range of Bluetooth and can transmit more than 20 times more data.
UWB has other significant advantages over Bluetooth because it works at a higher frequency – the pulse technology uses the spectrum from 3,1-10,6 GHz. It also uses wider 500MHz channels to transmit data (it's usually a maximum of 20MHz for Bluetooth), which allows the standard to send or receive bursts of data in a short amount of time.
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UWB is a relatively new wireless standard and as such is limited to flagship models in the smartphone world. It is currently supported by "flagships" from Samsung, Google and Apple. Car companies have been adopting it as an easy way to unlock cars for some time now, with brands such as BMW, Audi and Ford introducing it to their latest models. It is also used by Samsung SmartTag+ and SmartTag2 smart locators, which provide much better range and accuracy than the standard SmartTag, which relies on Bluetooth.
Which Samsung phones support UWB?
Samsung started introducing UWB to its flagship phones in 2020 with Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. Since then, however, the standard has only made it to select "flags", not all. Specifically, these devices have it Galaxy:
- Galaxy Note20Ultra
- Galaxy S21 +
- Galaxy S21Ultra
- Galaxy S22 +
- Galaxy S22Ultra
- Galaxy S23 +
- Galaxy S23Ultra
- Galaxy S24 +
- Galaxy S24Ultra
- Galaxy ZFold2
- Galaxy ZFold3
- Galaxy ZFold4
- Galaxy ZFold5
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It is worth noting that UWB is slowly making its way into the headphones, specifically they "know" it Galaxy Buds2 Pro and Pixel Buds Pro. For them, the standard enables easier pairing with phones.
