Qualcomm Races to Retool the Mobile Phone
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[&lt;a href="http://www.networkworld.com/news/financial/qualcomm.html"&gt;Qualcomm&lt;/a&gt;] has single-mindedly focused on its patented Code Division Multiple Access cellular technology, which is only now starting to bring useable wireless data links to mobile enterprise users.
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InfoWorld - Ongoing legal disputes over mobile phone patents between Nokia and Qualcomm are consuming much executive management time, generating substantial lawyer fees, and, if they escalate, could affect handset development and prices, experts warn.
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Google&#39;s Android software platform for mobile phones&#160;is coming to life in Barcelona with a number of chip manufacturers showing it running on prototype or proof-of-concept phones at the Mobile World Congress on Monday.Freescale, Marvell, NEC Electronics, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments all had Android on show. Most of them expect to see Android phones based on their chips on the market in the second half of this year.The hardware ranged from bulky development boards with daughter cards sticking out at unlikely angles to more compact devices small enough to slip into your pocket. All were built around chips containing processor cores designed by Arm, a British fabless semiconductor company.One of the most polished prototypes is on the Texas Instruments stand -- although TI representatives insisted that it&#39;s just an example of how a finished product could look as the company only makes chips, leaving the development of phones to its customers. &quot;We don&#39;t do plastic,&quot; one said.TI actually had Android running on two different devices. One was based on its OMAP850, a single-chip device containing an application processor for Android and a baseband processor for controlling the phone&#39;s radio interface. The other contained TI&#39;s OMAP3430 multimedia application processor, capable of decoding high-definition television signals at a resolution of 720p. It requires a separate baseband processor, and is designed for high-end multimedia phones.Developing software for a new phone typically takes 14 to 18 months, said Ramesh Iyer, mobile Internet device product manager at TI. &quot;Android cuts that dramatically. It&#39;s a disruptor,&quot; he said.Google is shaking the market in other ways, Iyer said. &quot;Android is a single stack. You don&#39;t have to go looking for third-party solutions. Suddenly, they have defragmented the whole Linux ecosystem into one building block,&quot; he said.Android is entering an already crowded market for mobile phone software: To see how crowded, you only had to look at the NEC stand, where four prototypes containing its Medity2 processor were packed onto a narrow table. One was running Symbian OS, one Windows Mobile, one Android on top of Wind River Linux, and the last was running the same Wind River Linux but with a different application layer based on software from Trolltech and Esmertec.NEC staff expressed surprise at the level of interest in Android, saying they expected more attention for the completed phones based on the Medity2 at the next table. Manufactured for NTT DoCoMo, those phones contained the version of Linux promoted by the LiMo Foundation.The two systems are not necessarily in competition, though. With Android&#39;s focus on the application layer and Limo&#39;s work on the middleware, the underlying services needed to link applications to the Linux kernel, the two can be complementary, NEC staff said.Marvell took the prize for the most secretive Android demonstrations, refusing to allow photographs and declining even to say on which of its communications processors the software was running. The company showed a compact handset running the Android interface with a bare minimum of applications and a more complete installation playing video and browsing the Web on a bulky development board. Shrinking that down to a pocket-sized device will not take long, staff said. In fact, they had one ready -- just not loaded with the Android software.Android&#39;s Linux roots are likely to encourage the development of a wave of new handset applications, said Marvell&#39;s marketing director Vish Deshmane.&quot;You will see a lot more software to run on devices from people who want to exploit the commonality with desktop systems. It&#39;s going to be a boon for the 3G world because more applications means more data traffic, so operators will be happy,&quot; he said.Over at Freescale Semiconductor, staff showed Google Maps zooming in on the center of Barcelona on a development board built around Freescale&#39;s i.MX31 processor. This processor is not intended for mobile phones at all, and is more at home in GPS&#160;terminals or media players such as Toshiba&#39;s Gigabit and Microsoft&#39;s Zune.Qualcomm&#39;s demonstration of its 7201 combined baseband and application processor sparkled, but did not exploit the chip&#39;s full potential. The spinning globe of Android&#39;s Global Time application turned smoothly even without the assistance of the 3D graphics hardware acceleration, for which the drivers are not yet ready, said Rob Woodford.Android phones based on the chip will go on sale in the second half of this year, Woodford said -- but U.S. readers should contain their excitement: the Qualcomm display was overshadowed by a card warning that&#160;it may be prohibited from shipping the products on show to the U.S.&#160;because of a Dec. 31 court injunction obtained by chip rival Broadcom in a patent infringement case.The Mobile World Congress runs through Thursday at the Fira de Barcelona showground.
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Qualcomm and Nokia are working to resolve their long-running, expensive legal dispute.
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A Nokia executive claims that its ongoing patent battle with Qualcomm may slow adoption of 3G cellular data technologies.
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The company is facing challenges as it changes its business from one focused on PDAs to one that specializes in smart phones.
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The race is on to come up with the world's thinnest cell phone screen.
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Java has suffered as a mobile content platform, compared to Qualcomm Brew, by having a fragmented channel and a confused economic proposition for developers.
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New processor may increase battery life and lower prices of video-playing mobile phones.
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There was scant consolation for chipmaker Qualcomm (QCOM) in a long-awaited court decision on its patent dispute with rival Broadcom (BRCM). On June 7, the U.S.
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The U.K. mobile giant wants to find a way to disentagle the Czech wireless and fixed-line businesses.
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Mobile advertising looks set to be one of the most discussed topics at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but the challenge for the telecoms industry this year will be to prove it is more than just hype.
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The dedicated tower network to be built by Qualcomm&#39;s MediaFLO USA subsidiary should give US carriers a smooth road for rolling out mobile multimedia services, though it may be some time before they embrace the idea.
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Nokia , the world's biggest mobile phone maker, said on Tuesday the ongoing patent battle with Qualcomm Inc.  may work against the uptake of "third-generation" mobile technology.
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Between Qualcomm and Broadcom, victory is in the eye of the beholder.
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Investors looking at Qualcomm&#39;s (QCOM:Nasdaq - news - research) fourth-quarter earnings report will be seeking a clear signal on the wireless sector.
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(InfoWorld) - Nokia and Qualcomm have entered a new round in their high-stakes fight over patent royalties, with the Finnish handset maker landing its first counter-punch. The Finnish company has responded to theÂ patent infringement lawsuit filed by QualcommÂ in the Western District of Wisconsin on April 2 by claiming that its products aren't infringing, and filing its first patent counter-suit against the U.S. chip company, Nokia said Thursday. Nokia's suit seeks damages and also an injunction against certain of Qualcomm's chip sets. "We're confident that our products don't infringe the two Qualcomm patents that are in suit and, in fact, we believe these patents are invalid," a Nokia spokeswoman said. The initial lawsuit filed by Qualcomm in Wisconsin concerns two patents covering speech encoders used in certain GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) mobile phones to digitize audio signals for transmission. In its counter-suit,Â Nokia accuses Qualcomm of infringingÂ six of its patents, relating primarily to multiband and multimode technologies that reduce handset and chip set size, cost, and power consumption. Standards bodies divide patents touching on the technologies they define into two categories: those essential to a standards-compliant product, and those that only cover a particular implementation of the standard. The six patents Nokia accuses Qualcomm of infringing are implementation patents, the spokeswoman said. Companies with essential patents included in a standard agree to license the technology under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms, but the companies can decide whether or not to license implementation patents to others, she said. Qualcomm had no agreement to use the six Nokia implementation patents, she said. Qualcomm has copied these innovations and made them available to its chip set customers, according to the Nokia spokeswoman. In April, Qualcomm filed another lawsuit against Nokia in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The separate lawsuit deals with three patents related to the downloading of applications and other digital content over GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) or EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) networks, two technologies for speeding the transmission of packet data in GSM networks. The Nokia spokeswoman declined to comment on the Texas lawsuit. Over the past 19 months, Qualcomm has filed 11 patent litigation cases against Nokia but in none of these cases has the company had any success, according to the spokeswoman. Legal disputes over mobile phone patents have grown in recent years, largely because of opportunities to generate significant revenue from licensing inventions to others. Numerous patent licensing disputes have accompanied mobile phone technologies such as GSM and WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), and are expected to flow from 4G (fourth-generation) systems now under development. In a interviewÂ earlier this month, Bill Davidson, senior vice president of investor relations and international marketing at Qualcomm, said the company has more than 1,000 essential patents for OFDM, OFDMA (OFDM Access) and MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) technologies, all of which form the foundation of new 4G technologies, whether WiMax, LTE (Long-Term Evolution) or UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband). Â