Interview: Qualcomm 'working on Nokia roadmap, not single launch'

When Kevin Shields took to the Nokia World stage last month, he was pretty clear that he thought the new Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone was "awesome". But the reception has been a little less vocal since.

While the Lumia 800 features a speedy 1.4GHz variant of the single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255, we asked Qualcomm's Enrico Salvatori, president of Qualcomm CDMA technologies in Europe if it was a problem that consumers were now looking for dual-core handsets.

He replied somewhat obliquely, saying the Lumia 800 is just the beginning of the relationship with Nokia – in other words, that it's working on other higher spec devices to come.

"We are working on a roadmap [with Nokia] and not a single device, a single launch. It's an important collaboration for Qualcomm, so we are very excited about working together. It's been very effective in terms of time to market because we developed the phone together. It's been a very successful development."

Salvatori added that it was a big achievement for both the Nokia and Qualcomm teams to bring the devices to market inside six months.

Snapdragon also features inside the Nokia Lumia 710 as well and Qualcomm is no stranger to working with either Nokia (with whom it built the ill-fated N9) or Microsoft, who it has been working with on Windows Phone 7 as well as the ARM version of Windows 8. Indeed, Qualcomm chips power every Windows Phone on the market.

"The Nokia collaboration is also very much about the Windows Phone ecosystem and, of course, we at Qualcomm, as you know, are supporting on our platform the Windows Phone software and actually at the moment we are the only supplier supporting the integrated solution."

Platform agnostic

Salvatori clearly eyes more opportunities with Microsoft's mobile OS, but says that it doesn't mean that Qualcomm has suddenly become platform specific.

"Windows Phone is an important ecosystem that we support. Our vision and our objective is very much to develop a platform, a roadmap that is optimised for multiple high level OS environments, so we adopt an agnostic approach in supporting all ecosystem environments.

"So definitely we are very active with Android and have a solid roadmap, Microsoft we have a roadmap [then there's] RIM, BlackBerry and our internal platform Brew."

Salvatori was also keen to stress the increasing importance of software and hardware being designed together and working together.

"I think we are giving evidence that a high level OS is another element [of delivering] an integrated platform. At the end of the day we strongly believe – and the markets [are telling us] – that a fully integrated solution is compelling and an attractive solution for our customers; [the] manufacturers."

"An integrated solution also reduces time to market, reducing the bill of materials, the component counts and also reducing power consumption of those components. It also reduces the size of the PCB so the form factor can be [smaller].

"It is very important for the market that [there is] integration of not only the GPU, CPU and modem but also in terms of a high level OS. So delivering a fully integrated platform with Microsoft [or] with Android is [best for] our customers."

Qualcomm has spoken recently about its upcoming roadmap and specifically about the quad-core, 28nm Snapdragon S4 which will see clockspeeds rising to a staggering 2.5GHz. There will also be a new Adreno graphics processor too.

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