nVidia loses major Tegra contract with Samsung, lowers expectations

News · 15 Apr 2010 · MTW Editorial Team

This shouldn’t come as a surprise especially for those who have been following nVidia for a while. The big green company has always been known to be good on the PR front but severely lacking when it comes to product delivery and real functionalities. According to Semiaccurate, Samsung has decided to drop a major contract it had with Nvidia for Tegra based phones. I’ve been following Tegra news and developement ever since it was announced back in 2008 find it kinda ironic that the only handheld products shipping with a Tegra SoC are the Zune HD and the Samsung M1 PMP (this thing shouldn’t even count given that it was only released in South Korea and nearly didn’t sell at all). Interstingly the first (and probably last) Tegra based phones are only coming out now, the Kin One & Two. Here again there’s nothing exceptional given that those two products are basically Zune HD phones as I reported here they have the exact same Tegra APX2600 and run on the same WinCE Kernel. As Charlie points out in his post, nVidia totally messed the whole thing since the beginning by partnering exclusively with Microsoft. Tegra was supposed to be the preferred SoC for Windows Mobile 7 handsets (launching in Q3/4 2009) and if memory doesn’t fail me, a couple of WM7 Motorola products were supposed to hit the market in Fall 09 and even HTC had a Tegra based phone (SuperStar) in the works back then,same for Samsung (see linkedIn info on WM7/Tegra work). Unfortunately Microsoft decided to scrap WM7 aka Photon in Q2 2008 leaving nVidia only with the Pink Project that was supposed to launch at MWC 09 (it didn’t and MS only unveiled WM6.5.) Because Tegra was only compatible with WinCE, nVidia had to go back and work on Android/linux support if it wanted to have a chance to sell its chip to OEM/ODMs. But it was too late, Motorola decided to goo 100% Android and use TI OMAP and Qualcomm MSM SoCs,  HTC didn’t see any reason to continue developing a Tegra device given the availability of the more advanced Cortex A8 based Snapdragon SoC  etc…And to make matters worst, Microsoft has decided that Qualcomm’s SnapDragon will be the only supported chipset in Windows Phone 7 in the near future. That leaves nVidia with the KIN phones which are basically the result of the initial partnership with Microsoft 2 years ago. So don’t expect to see any Tegra smartphones in the market soon (and Tegra 2 is currently aimed at the smartbook/netbook market now).

Via: Semiaccurate