Qualcomm’s Exclusivity Coming to an End with HTC?

After revealing disappointing financial figures for its Winter quarter, HTC revealed a couple interesting tidbits in its recent earnings call. The first being the creation of a ‘cross-disciplinary’ Studio group that will report directly to the CEO to create new and compelling products. The second of which is that the company is now more open to utilizing mobile applications processors from vendors other than HTC.

News of HTC’s component-openness comes from the company’s Chief Financial Officer:

“ … for most components there are multiple sources. And we actually want to and make sure that we do have multiple sources for a single component. So we have, I think, a very good range of suppliers to choose from on CPU, for example, or memory, for example. And I don’t think we are constrained in any way from a component point of view…”

In the past, HTC had chosen to standardize its CPU through an agreement with Qualcomm. As Qualcomm provides integrated wireless, graphics, and processing on its ARM-based processor, the utilization of Qualcomm CPU had helped HTC create thinner phones with less power requirements. However, not all was well-received with that partnership. In the early Windows Mobile days, HTC and Qualcomm had undergone a lot of heat from customers who had expected more from the integrated CPU-GPU processors and found out that their HTC-made smartphones were essentially crippled as HTC did not license the necessary graphics drivers from Qualcomm.

That issue had since been fixed and HTC smartphones in recent years do not suffer those graphics issues.

As HTC looks to broaden its choices for chipsets, we can potentially expect to see chips from NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Marvell, and Samsung come to play on the company’s Android handsets. The move would also open HTC up to potentially winning a deal with Google to create a future Nexus products as Google often chooses the reference chipset required to develop its hardware around for a new Android OS version.

The move may also help HTC to deliver quad-core products in a timely manner and remain competitive as chip-maker NVIDIA is already out the gate with a quad-core Tegra 3 processor.

Via: Unwired View