• MOST READ

• LATEST NEWS

HTC and T-Mobile USA managed to gain the kudos of going live first with Google Android, an on the chip front, the honors go to Qualcomm. The G1, unveiled this week, runs on the CDMA giant's dual-core MSM7201A chip.

This is a further boost for Qualcomm's belief that smartphones do not need to feature dedicated applications processors to deliver high end performance, and the G1's chip comes with fully integrated processing, multimedia, graphics and multimode. The single-chip approach reduces cost and power, but companies like Texas Instruments, with its Omap apps processors, and graphics add-on specialist Nvidia, are still hoping the performance requirements of superphones will make their products essential - as in the iPhone.

The other chipmakers will be hard on Qualcomm's heels in the Android market though, and TI, Broadcom and Marvell are among the baseband makers in the membership of Android supporters' club Open Handset Alliance. Several semiconductor makers have already demonstrated reference designs running Android - including, at the Mobile World Congress in February, STMicro, TI and Marvell - and will be hoping for design wins as more handset makers enter the market. Integrating a chip with a new operating system is not a trivial task and Qualcomm will certainly have scored points by getting into a commercial device ahead of the field. Qualcomm is a long term supplier to HTC and also an investor in the Taiwanese company.

COMMENTS

No comments yet. Be the first to add a comment!

Digital Money: The Convergence of Contactless Card and Mobile Payments

This report examines the emergence of digital money from the perspective of the convergence of card-based proximity payments to the...

Cloudbooks: Market Analysis and Forecasts
This report is based on interviews with device OEMs, retailers and resellers and provides a comprehensive analysis of the new cloudbook...