News · 4 Mar 2011 · MTW Editorial Team
Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference Thursday Qualcomm said that it’s hoping to be the sole provider of chipsets for the upcoming Nokia Windows Phone 7 handset confirming what I was telling you a few days ago after I came back from Mobile World Congress. Everybody quickly assumed that ST-Ericsson was going to provide the SoCs to power the Finnish upcoming handsets after its CEO claimed that they were working on WP7 support after the Microsoft partnership was announced. Here’s what Qualcomm CFO Bill Keitel said:
We stepped out some time ago with a major investment in high level operating system and porting to Microsoft was one of those. So we’re the first to port the Win Mobile 7 and I think we’re the only chip set provider yet today. That was a good year effort of hard work for us to get to that point. So you know, we’re hoping Nokia and Microsoft will go fast here and we’re ready to support them.
After the Nokia Qualcomm battles ended a few years ago, the relationship really started improving and we started building a workforce right next door to Nokia’s major facilities in the Scandinavia area. We got a little disillusioned with Symbian and so we pulled back a little bit but we were still focused on MeeGo. But then one of the keys of our chipset business is the support we bring to help people launch devices and a lot of times we have people right next door.
After the Microsoft-Nokia deal was announced Keitel said “there were a few smiles in the hallways of Qualcomm that day.” I guessed so on the same day in of my tweets.
It was no small amount of risk we took of major dollars, major effort. And of course now that we’re there our effort is going to be on improving it, improving the performance, expanding the portfolio which we’ve ported Windows 7 to our chip sets. Hopefully we’re ready to and Nokia is interested in a broad portfolio, high end to low end.
So as you can see, nothing is set in stones yet and Qualcomm is going to do everything possible to be the sole Windows Phone 7 chipset provider.
source: Zdnet
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