Qualcomm Aiming at Intel's Market

Qualcomm is aiming to move into the territory dominated by the likes of Intel with its Snapdragon chipset platform which is aimed at the mini-laptops more commonly known as netbooks. However, Intel itself is also increasingly moving into the mobile device market, so Qualcomm faces both an opportunity and a risk.

Talking to the Financial Times, Qualcomm CEO, Paul Jacobs said "Intel is trying to figure out how to get into the smart phone space, they call them 'mids' [mobile internet devices], trying to change the name," adding that "In the computing space, I think there's going to be a competition between Snapdragon-based netbooks and the [Intel] Atom-based netbooks,"

The company anticipates that aroun fifteen companies will launch Snapdragon based netbooks in the first half of this year - all expected to run on Linux as opposed to Microsoft's Windows operating system.

He noted that there was a race between making the Linux platform more user friendly while Windows/Intel work to lower its chip power consumption to match the performance of a Linux based platform.

Mr Jacobs added: "The next two years are going to be really interesting in mobile computing because you're going to see these highly connected netbooks at very low price points - particularly if they come through an operator channel and they are subsidised."

In a related development, last week the firm showed of the Google backed smartphone OS, Android running on the Snapdragon platform - and other people have managed to get it to work on an Asus netbook.

On the web: Financial Times

Posted to the site on 12th January 2009