Qualcomm In Talks With KDDI On Mobile Teleconference Service
Wednesday January 29, 4:35 am ET
TOKYO -(Dow Jones)- Qualcomm Inc. (NasdaqNM:QCOM - News) is in talks with KDDI Corp. (J.KDD or 9433) to provide a new wireless teleconference service based on its binary runtime environment for wireless, or BREW, platform, a senior Qualcomm executive said Tuesday.
"We're speaking now to global carriers about QChat," including KDDI, said Peggy Johnson, president of Qualcomm's Internet Services Division, at a press briefing in Tokyo.
Qualcomm's "QChat" service will be ready for commercial use worldwide by the end of this June, she added.
Earlier Tuesday, mobile operator KDDI said it plans to launch late next month a new mobile communications service based on Qualcomm's BREW platform.
KDDI's new service will enable users to run and download software applications from KDDI's servers. This will allow users to customize their BREW-capable cellphones.
The U.S. wireless-technology firm is also seeking to introduce its BREW platform on personal digital assistants in the future, Johnson said.
"We're very much interested in putting BREW on PDAs, and the carriers are starting to drive that," she said.
Johnson said Qualcomm may make an announcement about its strategy for BREW in the field of PDAs in the April-June quarter of this year.
To gain a foothold in the operating system software market for so-called " smart" cellphones, Qualcomm intends to work together with mobile OS software makers such as Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - News) and Symbian PLC to help them to enable the downloading of their applications onto handsets, Johnson said.
"We're starting some of those conversations," she said.
Both Microsoft and Symbian are aggressively competing with each other to convince cellular operators and handset manufacturers worldwide to adopt their mobile OS software for "smart" phones, which combine a mobile phone with personal computer functions.
-By Ron Harui, Dow Jones Newswires; 813-5255-2929; ron.harui@dowjones.com
biz.yahoo.com |
