Member News

Qualcomm shows off its IQ

30 November 2009

New AIME member Qualcomm held an interesting event last month, called Innovation Qualcomm ( IQ ), to demonstrate and showcase the US company’s latest technologies and strategy roadmap for the foreseeable future.

Some people are still asking the question: “Why is Qualcomm interested in Europe?” when its traditional markets remain in the US and Far Eastern regions. Qualcomm EVP and President, Andrew Gilbert, didn’t waste any time before tackling this issue.

“Europe is an incredibly important part of the market,” said Gilbert. “With nearly half of all European mobile users predicted to be on 3G connections by the end of 2010.”

And if Western Europe is considered a major market for 3G then just take a look at growth prospects for Eastern Europe, where current 3G penetration resides at a lowly 7 percent but is forecast to grow to 11 percent next year, according to Gilbert.

The question which Qualcomm is asking, as well as the collective minds of the mobile industry is, what will people actually do with all this 3G capacity? “It’s always about the new,” said Gilbert. “And the new can come about in some strange ways.”

In terms of mobile applications, Qualcomm’s BREW platform has delivered more than two billion paid-for apps, said Gilbert and is still the largest premium mobile applications store on the market. But what about the iPhone?! I hear you shout. Well, the iPhone iTunes store might have seen more downloads in numbers, but a lot of those apps are free. With Brew, they are all paid for.

In addition, Qualcomm has achieved these figures on a feature phone platform, not a smartphone platform, said Gilbert. “Not just a single OS with four or five different device types. We’ve got some previous in this market, some ability to execute in this space.”

Despite the relative demise of the Brew platform over the past couple years, app stores continue to remain central to Qualcomm’s content strategy and reflecting this is the rise of Plaza. “We’re going beyond the notion of a single app store,” said Gilbert. “You’re going to see that market segment, mature and fragment.” It won’t just be operators and handset manufacturers owning app stores, but also web portals and big name brands too. The Qualcomm pitch will be to run app stores for companies as an outsourced service.

This is something AIME’s K&N Seminars will be taking a look at next year, see www.aimelink.org/events/upcoming_seminars.aspx .

Devices – Qualcomm's big new idea of 'Smartbooks' – the form factor of a notebook laptop with the smartness of a smartphone. Not netbooks, mind, or even Nokia's briefly-mooted definition of 'smart laptops'. “It's Gigahertz processing with pervasive connectivity with cloud computing with social features,” said Gilbert.

Onto FLO TV, which has just launched its Personal Television device. Gilbert talked about e-book readers too – an area Qualcomm has just got into via its Mirasol display division. “It's a fantastic form factor in an area where we see great growth going forward,” he said.

Roberto di Piettro from QCT then took the stage to talk tech. In 2009, the number of devices using Qualcomm tech inside doubled compared to 2008 – more than 700 new designs, compared to more than 400. The company is on course to ship 317 million of its MSM chipsets this year.

Snapdragon is what's moving the company's tech upwards, from feature phones into smartphones, not to mention smartbooks and consumer electronics devices.

"We are currently working with more than 15 different customers and are going to deliver into the market more than 40 different devices," he said, referring to both smartphones and smartbooks.

The company is working with Windows Mobile, Android and Symbian in making its chips work well with their OS platforms. He also brings up a slide on games performance and Qualcomm chipsets. So its current chipset can deliver similar game performance to an iPhone 3GS or PS2, but in 2011-2013, its chipset will be capable of Xbox 360 / PS3 quality graphics.

Which is quite astounding really.

"For us, it's really about software and silicon that drives a better user experience," he said.

And back to Gilbert for the wrap-up. "What if your device had a sixth sense? What if it had the opportunity to know you - who you are, what you're doing - learn from what you do, discover the things and people that are interesting to you, but filter out the things that aren't of interest to you..."