There are plenty of cheap Android phones with 5G now. E.g. there are a few nice Nokia ones. I wouldn't buy a phone without support for that right now. This stuf

There are plenty of cheap Android phones with 5G now. E.g. there are a few nice Nokia ones. I wouldn't buy a phone without support for that right now. This stuff was standardized and agreed years ago and it's just the rollout that is going very slowly. The same happened with 4G. That took many years. The point of 5G is better quality of service. Marketing people of course dumb down the improvements to "it's faster" but throughput is actually the least important thing. Though of course a better QoS means that operators can guarantee a bit better throughput as well. Better latency, improved scaling for operators (more connected devices in an area), lower power usage, and more reliable connections. That is a big issue for me with 4G. Coverage here in Germany is not great and even in areas that are covered, the quality of service is pretty bad and I often struggle to get it to work at all even in places that are supposedly well covered. E.g. the are around the TV tower in Berlin (i.e. the largest FFing antenna in the wider area) is pretty bad because the area is full of tourists usually and the local base station ins hopelessly oversubscribed. That's the kind of stuff you could reasonably expect to improve with 5G.