Qualcomm talks Snapdragon, scrutinises iPhone

And pats itself on the back

Enrico Salvatori, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Qualcomm Europe

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3 December 2008 19:01 GMT / By Chris Hall

At their European Innovation Showcase in London today, Qualcomm took the opportunity to pat itself on the back for its involvement in the development of many of today’s most exciting devices. This year Qualcomm chipsets have found their way into the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, T-Mobile G1, BlackBerry Storm and the INQ "Facebook" phone.

In an interesting comparison, Enrico Salvatori, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Qualcomm Europe, showed gathered European journalists where Apple went wrong with the iPhone (in his opinion), revealing that the adopted solution used 12 chips from 7 vendors, whereas the T-Mobile G1 used only 7 chips from 4 vendors.

Convergence on single chip multi-mode solutions, such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, boasted Salvatori, is key to delivering smaller, less power hungry, and less costly solutions.

The latest Snapdragon chip will find its way into the hands of developers in 2009 with the first devices expected within that year, giving a good idea of what is coming in the future.

The recently announced dual core Snapdragon chip (QSD8672) will deliver a single chip with integrated support for GPS, Wi-Fi, HSPA+ (and existing mobile networks), as well as supporting high powered processors, up to 1.5GHz, and WSXGA displays, HD video recording and playback, and image sensors up to 12 megapixels.

Qualcomm also showed off some previously seen prototypes and demoed HSPA+ in action which seemed to be achieving a pretty consistent average of 20Mbps.