Warning: Pure Speculation Follows
In connection with its earnings release for Q2, Wind announced that it had signed four new VAR agreements during the quarter, bringing the total to 30. Of the four, the only one they were ready to put a name on was LSI Logic. I am guessing that Qualcomm may be one of the three unidentified VARs.
Qualcomm recently announced “Sample Shipments of MSM3300 Solution Integrate Advanced Wireless Internet Launchpad Technologies Including Position Location, Bluetooth, MP3, MIDI and Mass Storage Device Controller” biz.yahoo.com
Included in the release is a list of customers, “including: Acer Peripherals, Inc., ALPS ELECTRIC CO., LTD.; CASIO COMPUTER CO., LTD.; FUJITSU LIMITED; Hitachi, Ltd.; Hyundai Electronics Industries Co., Ltd.; KYOCERA CORPORATION; LG Information and Communications, Ltd.; Samsung Electronics Ltd.; SANYO Electric Co., Ltd.; and Toshiba Corporation, among others”.
We know that Acer uses Wind in its set top boxes, Casio in car navigation systems and internet appliances and Fujitsu for support for its Sparclite processor family, Hyundai for digital video systems, Kyocera for laser printers, Sanyo for its internet screen phone, and Toshiba for support for various processors. Hitachi and Wind recently announced a center of excellence to more closely integrate their design and development efforts. There are undoubtedly other links as well.
For a look at where LG is heading with its mobile phones, see here windriver.com
“The next generation of mobile devices may be coming sooner than you think, as a few phone vendors were aggressively showing their wares. The most forward thinking was Korea’s Lucky Goldstar (LG) Electronics, whose LG TeleCom division develops mobile handsets for the worldwide market. They were demonstrating a KVM-based set of phones under the banner "ez-Java.” They plan to deploy these phones toward the end of this calendar year. Sample Java applications that ran on the KVM embedded on these phones ranged from a personal information manager to a wide array of popular games. All on a tiny monochrome LCD screen.
The LG engineering team mentioned that their range of phones contained 512K to 1MB of RAM running on an ARM-7 microprocessor, and were based on their own internal port of Sun's KVM onto Qualcomm's proprietary embedded OS, called Rex. As they were using Qualcomm's phone chipsets, they decided to utilize the proprietary design that was handed to them, but were looking forward to the fact that the KVM standard was indeed an open standard for leveraging applications.”
It makes sense to me that at least some of these customers may be wanting to move to a standardized development environment for all or most of their efforts. Additionally, Qualcomm has mentioned in the past that they were looking to possibly port their MSM series of chips to VxWorks. They already use VxWorks extensively in their base station products, and Wind has publicly said that the two companies have a close relationship.
Qualcomm is in an intense battle to have its CDMA standard adopted as widely as possible. Anything they can do to further this objective would seem to make great business sense.
My guess is that they will soon offer their chips with either Rex or VxWorks.
Anyone have any guess as to who the other VARs could be? |
