Qualcomm - beyond mobile phones
Saturday, May 3, 2008
My last Qualcomm article talked about its mobile phone chipset strategy. Here, I want to highlight Qualcomm’s other hardware offerings that greatly expand its market possibilities, especially in the mobile computing space. These products and the software/service initiatives that the company has been taking recently allow it to shed its ‘CDMA-company’ or ‘mobile-phone chipset company' tag to help become a more global and well-recognized brand.
Qualcomm, with a head-start in this concept, has gained good traction with the vendors. HP recently announced their plans to ship Gobi-enabled laptops. The company has secured design wins with five major laptop OEMs and several major networks have certified the
Qualcomm’s other big move towards mobile computing and convergence is the Snapdragon. The Snapdragon platform is designed as the single-stop shop for handset vendors looking to converge on mobility and computing (e.g. a hybrid of the iPhone and the Air.) The low-power, high performance platform, Qualcomm says, is designed for pocket-sized portable computers with 4-5 inch screens. This platform is already designed into 15 devices and is expected to hit the markets in the latter half of this year.
Sanjay Jha suggests that the Snapdragon does not compete with
The third product is the Snap Star or QST solutions targeting consumer electronics. The Snap Star solutions combine GPS, wireless connectivity, multimedia and broadcast TV to consumer-oriented devices such as personal navigation and mobile entertainment devices. This, it seems to me, is targeting the GPS flavor of Intel’s Mobile Internet Devices (MID).