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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (76926)	5/6/2008 12:27:27 PM
From: A.J. Mullen	Respond to of 197297

Diamond Debut Could Be Good News for Qualcomm Tuesday May 6, 11:31 am ET ByTero Kuittinen, RealMoney.com Contributor HTC is currently in the process of becoming a notable smartphone brand -- and the announcement of the new Diamond range this week is a major coup. HTC's formidable product momentum could be yet another edge for Qualcomm over Texas Instruments this calendar year. It certainly poses an additional challenge for Motorola and Sony Ericsson as they try to reverse their high-end erosion. Over the past six months, Korean phone brands Samsung and LG have showed strong leadership in bringing advanced display technology to high-end phones. As a result, their combined market share has been on the uptick. Notably, Samsung and LG did not show a typical seasonal dip in phone volumes from the 2007 fourth quarter to the first quarter of 2008, even as volumes of Sony Ericsson and Motorola tumbled by more than 20%. Niche Player HTC is smaller than Samsung or LG, and it has a far tighter focus on smarpthones. But in some senses, HTC is part of the same wave of Asian challenger brands investing heavily in display technology to coax consumers into switching brands. Over the past winter, HTC has emerged as the strongest Windows smartphone brand globally. The Touch range of compact smartphones has sold strongly in Southeast Asia and Western Europe. The company's core strategy has been to offer slightly weaker specifications than leading multimedia devices at moderately lower prices. This appeals to operators who want to broaden the smartphone user base in order to get consumers to use more mobile-data services -- thus HTC has become a recent favorite of many European megacarriers. The new Diamond range HTC unveiled is a typically clever concoction of the cutting edge and the slightly cheap. The display/thickness combination of Diamond is a stunner -- a touchscreen featuring 640x480 pixels in a phone that is less than 11mm thick. That is twice the pixel count of the iPhone in a slightly slimmer chassis -- or four times the pixels of the Nokia N95 8GB in a phone literally half as thick. Intriguingly, HTC packs the industry-leading pixel package into a screen that is just 2.8 inches -- slightly below the 3 or 3.5 inches that leading Korean models or iPhone offer. This trade-off combined with the slightly weak 3.2 megapixel camera quality enables HTC to offer a device that is thinner than its big-screen rivals. Rocking the High-End Segment HTC is a small vendor that focuses on carefully selected niches -- consumers who want a Windows device, consumers who prefer a slightly smaller display for better picture quality and thinner build. Selling three million Diamond phones in six months would be a triumph for HTC, so this vendor isn't exactly about to bury any of the big guys. But together with Samsung and LG, HTC may just rock the boat a bit in the high-end phone segment -- particularly in Europe. It's becoming increasingly clear that Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Nokia all made a miscalculation when they did not prep serious ranges of handsets equipped with large touch displays for 2008. The Diamond will start selling in Europe already in June -- this is four to six months ahead of the first Sony Ericsson phone with VGA-quality display and possibly two to four quarters before Nokia starts shifting its N-series to VGA era. Hitting the Big Boys The new leaks of Motorola's upcoming -- and seriously delayed - 5-megapixel camera phone look scarily old-fashioned. Is Motorola seriously planning to stick with the ancient QVGA display technology for the winter of 2008/2009? That Q stands for "quarter," or one fourth of the muscle that VGA displays flex. It seems possible that there is now a chain reaction of dysfunction ricocheting through Motorola's phone unit. The key high-end models may have been delayed for so long that they will be obsolete when they debut, triggering further market-share losses, employer defections, operator order cancellations and delays in the next development projects. The HTC Diamond seems to be widely ordered by most of Europe's large mobile carriers; it could well accelerate consumer defections this summer to Asian brands leveraging interest in new display classes. The surge of Samsung, LG and HTC favors Qualcomm over Texas Instruments, erodes Nokia's N-series volume hegemony and speeds up the high-end market share losses of Sony Ericsson and Motorola. I am not sure that investors yet fully grasp the magnitude of this trend. The key issue here is that there does not seem to be anything in the horizon that would reverse these trends until the first quarter 2009. HTC and the Koreans keep rolling out hot models with advanced touch screens and early launch dates -- and their Western rivals seem to be stuck in the old QVGA era.

To: slacker711 who wrote (76926)	5/6/2008 3:46:28 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 197297

Qualcomm ramps up MEMS display production May 6, 2008 2:35 PM, By Kevin Fitchard telephonyonline.com Qualcomm is shifting its nanotechnology project Mirasol into high gear, announcing a partnership with Foxlink to break ground on a new fabrication plant in Taiwan that will manufacture the reflective ambient-light displays in volume. Qualcomm currently has a manufacturing deal with Prime View International to make black and white displays for the handful of devices that currently use Marisol technology. The complexity of manufacturing the Micro-Electrical Mechanical Systems (MEMS) screens—which use thousands of tiny mirrors to reflect surrounding light—has limited the size and capabilities of the first Mirasol devices. The screens have been embedded into budget phones and Bluetooth headsets, all of which have nothing near the resolution or depth of the typical color handset screen. The agreement with Foxlink will allow Qualcomm not only to ramp up production of the MEMS devices but to scale the screens to larger sizes as well as add depth and color, making them suitable for the average handset or even high-end devices. Qualcomm isn’t revealing any specific production goals or details on the types or sizes of screens it will manufacture, but the dedicated plant will allow it to scale qualitatively and quantitatively if it so chooses. “We have seen a strong response to Mirasol displays and have made significant traction in the last year,” said Jim Cathey, vice president of business development for Qualcomm MEMS technology. Though displays are traditionally outside of Qualcomm’s radio chipset core business, the vendor began pursuing nanotechnology solutions to screens as a means of tackling the power drain problem in mobile phones. As phones gain more multimedia capabilities, both the size of the screens and the growing use of wireless data have placed increasing demands on a phone’s power, but battery technologies have not been able to keep up. Power drain was one of main reasons Apple cited for not adding 3G capabilities to its first iPhone. Traditional light-emitting diode (LED) screens use a backlight as an illumination source, which constantly taxes battery power. The MEMS screens, however, require no back light. Instead the actuating mirrors reflect ambient light, either opening or closing to render an image. Scaling MEMS screens to larger sizes have proved problematic: as screens grow larger, the number of mirrors increases exponentially, and adding color dramatically increases the complexity of the component. That’s why Qualcomm’s initial implementations have been in low-end phones with 1-inch black-and-white screens such as Hisense’s C108. Targeted at developing markets, the phone is designed to hold a long charge in areas where power supplies aren’t readily available. The Foxlink plant is slated to go online in 2009 in Taoyuan, Taiwan, and will be dedicated toward Mirasol production. Foxlink itself uses Mirasol display technology in two consumer products: a watch with an embedded GSM phone and a stereo Bluetooth headset.

To: slacker711 who wrote (76926)	5/6/2008 5:22:35 PM
From: Rich Bloem	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 197297

Dang Slacker, that is one fine looking phone. And, aimed directly at the I-phone. I can't believe they would introduce a phone like this with a herky-jerky touch screen. They will fix it before launch or it will die on the vine. Got to thank Apple for energizing the industry with their UI.

To: slacker711 who wrote (76926)	5/6/2008 10:22:51 PM
From: slacker711	Respond to of 197297

HTC World Press Event Wrap Up boygeniusreport.com Posted by Joshua Karp on May 6, 2008 6:49 pm 4 comments Filed in Windows Mobile, Handsets, Features, HTC It’s been quite a day here in London with HTC rolling out the red carpet treatment in recognition of the launch of their new Touch Diamond handset. We’ll certainly be the first to admit that we were a bit underwhelmed by the Touch Diamond announcement when it first hit. The phone has been circulating the web for a week or two now, and we were really hoping that the company would announce a full line of handsets, including the rumored Raphael with a full QWERTY keyboard. While we would still like to have seen a bit more from the Taiwanese company today, upon reflection, we think that the launch is certainly deserving of merit and accolade. The TouchFLO 3D interface is, in a word, amazing. If you thought the original TouchFLO skin was impressive (or even unimpressive) than you’re in for a big surprise here. This is, without a doubt, the most un-Windows Mobile-like Windows Mobile interface we’ve ever seen, and that’s a good thing. The graphics, which rely on their own 3D accelerator chip, are stunning, and the entire user experience is exceptionally well thought through. Hyper-intuitive design is the term than comes to mind, with most every action, from contact scrolling to music selection, thought through from the perspective of a uninformed user. It’s not dumbed down, it’s just simple and straight forward. One of the most impressive features is the way that the browser automatically resizes zoomed chunks of text for easy reading and consumption. Think Mobile Safari, but even more readable. The introduction of the Touch Diamond before the Raphael or Touch Pro Dual also makes sense, as HTC is clearly trying to showcase the innovations they’ve made in the Touch UI arena before moving on to more extensive hardware revisions. That’s not to say we wouldn’t have loved a TyTN III or Mogul II announcement, but when viewed from a marketing and customer orientation perspective, their process starts to make a bit more sense. Again, we would have loved to see more new stuff today — Android, Raphael, etc, but we’re confident that HTC is making some pretty good moves and laying a solid foundation for their future product lines. Was the event today worthy of the hype? Maybe not, but it’s by no means the misstep we initially thought it to be.