Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) intends to support Nokia's (NYSE:NOK) smartphones running Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone platform in a long-term product roadmap, according to a Qualcomm executive. The comments come after ST-Ericsson announced earlier this month that its chips will be inside future Nokia Windows Phone devices, breaking Qualcomm's iron grip as the silicon supplier for the platform.
"We are working on a roadmap [with Nokia] and not a single device, a single launch," Enrico Salvatori, president of Qualcomm CDMA technologies in Europe, told TechRadar. "It's an important collaboration for Qualcomm, so we are very excited about working together. It's been very effective in terms of time to market because we developed the phone together. It's been a very successful development."
Qualcomm's single-core 1.4 GHz Snapdragon processors power Nokia's first two Windows Phone devices, the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, which will go on sale in Europe this month; Nokia intends to release U.S. Windows Phone products early next year. Salvatori went to great lengths to highlight the partnership between Nokia and Qualcomm, and the fact that they were able to deliver device to the market a little more than eight months after Nokia committed to Windows Phone.
"The Nokia collaboration is also very much about the Windows Phone ecosystem and, of course, we at Qualcomm, as you know, are supporting on our platform the Windows Phone software and actually at the moment we are the only supplier supporting the integrated solution," he said.
Still, it looks like there will be more competition on the horizon. ST-Ericsson's NovaThor chipset, a solution that integrates an applications processor along with baseband processors, will find its way into Nokia Windows Phone devices, though it's unclear when that will happen. NovaThor supports a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 application processor as well as support for modem technologies including WCDMA, HSPA and LTE.
For more:
- see this TechRadar article
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