Posts Tagged ‘Qualcomm’

Windows Phone 7 may be taking the bulk of the attention from Windows Mobile, but good old WinMo devices are still making their way through the FCC.  A mysterious device codenamed “Fenway” made its way through the FCC on Friday, thanks to a filing by Qualcomm.

As you can see from the text above, Fenway is a ruggedized PC that will be used in enterprise markets.  The Qualcomm chip inside Fenway supports Bluetooth, 802.11 b/g WiFi and 3G data.

We don’t have much to go on other than that, but we’ll keep you updated as we learn more.

FCC filings showing the innards of the HTC Touch Pro 2 were recently made public.  While the introduction of Windows Phone 7 Series will probably reduce interest in Windows Mobile 6.x devices like the Touch Pro 2, it is interesting to take a closer look at the construction of the Touch Pro 2 and the chip choices made by HTC.

Qualcomm’s MSM7600 528 MHz processor is at the heart of the Touch Pro 2.  While it’s no SnapDragon, the MSM7600 has some impressive capabilities, like the ability to render 4 million triangles per second and 532 million pixels per second.

You can also see a Broadcom BCM4325 WiFi/Bluetooth processor in the Touch Pro 2.  This low-power chip has become popular in smartphones.  The BCM4325 actually features an FM receiver and 802.11 a capabilities, but it appears that Qualcomm disabled these features for the Touch Pro 2.

The Touch Pro 2 uses a NAND Flash chip from Samsung for storage.  This isn’t a surprise, since Samsung leads the NAND market in revenue market share.

This tiny concept mobile phone made an appearance at the Qualcomm booth during CES.  The phone shows off Qualcomm’s tiny baseband processors – I believe this phone uses Qualcomm’s QSC line of chips.

As you can see, the QSC chip in this device is about the size of a quarter, while the entire phone is just a few inches long and about an inch wide.  Interestingly, it seems the main problem here is not how to make a phone tiny – the major challenge for Qualcomm was to make a phone this tiny that can still be used by our oafish human fingers.

Qualcomm’s solution is a gesture and voice-based interface.  You navigate through the device’s menu with gestures, for example, moving the device in a downward motion moves the menu selector down, and shaking the device right selects that item.  To make calls or send text messages users simply speak phone numbers or messages, and these are recognized by the phone and converted into characters.

When demoed, the gesture interface did its job, but it wasn’t an elegant solution – navigating through menus involved a lot of overemphasized gestures that would look quite odd in public and would make using the phone while driving nearly impossible, or at least highly dangerous.

There’s no indication of if this device will ever make it to the consumer market, and if it does we’re not really sure if there will be demand for a phone this tiny.

Qualcomm passed their Gobi2000 wireless module through the FCC today.  The device promises users global 3G with support for a broad range of wireless standards, including GSM/EDGE, CDMA/EVDO and WCDMA/HSPA, in both US and international bands.  That’s a huge benefit for globetrotting business users.  The Gobi2000 also packs in GPS capabilities, as well.

Lenovo has already announced that the Gobi2000 will be available in X, T and W Series ThinkPads, and other laptop vendors such as HP are expected to follow suit.

Gobi2000 laptops are expected to arrive in early 2010.

I haven’t seen any device with Qualcomm’s MDM8200 processor…until today.  Sierra Wireless’ MC8700 data card passed through the FCC today, and internal pics show a Qualcomm MDM8200 under hood.

The MDM8200 is a HSPA+ processor that promises up to 28 Mbps downstream and 11 Mbps upstream.  That’s a lot of wireless bandwidth to play with.

No word where or when the MC8700 will appear, but I’m guessing it should start to show up in laptops soon.