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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Incorporated (QCOM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (25861)	4/1/1999 11:29:00 PM
From: engineer	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 152472

Ok, so when was the last time you were allowed to carry lighter fluid on an airplane? I am talking about the next 5 years. After that, the microelectronics will make the battery problem go away by themselves. The actual digital core of the phone consumes less than 15% of the operating power of the phone these days. It is the radio and the power amp that takes up the pwoer. As the cell size drops and the coverage gets alot better, power output can be dropped down to less than 1 milliwatt. Right now in the last 1 km of cell radius near the center of the cell, the power output on IS-95 is less than 100 microwatts. At that point the RF chips are the dominant factor is power dissapation. Get rid or reduce those down ( wiht Silicon Germanium Vbe drop of .2 volts, you can reduce the analog power supply down to less than .5 volts. this will reduce the power in the RF sections to less than 10% of what it is today). then if they blast this back up with the Pentium class PIII at 366 Mhz, the power goes way up. I forsee the actual power of the PDA section dropping as well to where you can run the phone and the PDA on two AA cells for a week or more and when you don;t like it, you throw them away and buy another set almost anywhere on earth for another 79 cents. The point in all this is the lowest power will win in the end. For all reasons. I see a long time before the new battery stuff that you describe becomes mainstream. Let's see Apple pioneered putting Lithium Ion bateries into laptops, only to have them catch fire, but that was back in 1990? So we are now in 1999 and we still do not have everyone using Li batteries. We still have Nicad, NiMH, Alkaline, etc. So assume that they perfected and sold the first commercially available cell today, then is that 2005, 2007, or 2009 that we actually see them mainstream where you can buy them at the corner store? Remember that it took from 1994 to 1997 just to get replacement Li batteries for Qualcomm phones that were NOT sold by Qualcomm/sony in the mainstream. And this was 1 year AFTER (1993) they were used in the Siemens P4 phone for European GSM. Of course most of those were relicensed Sony batteries anyway. I do not doubt that they may be used, but it generally takes 5-7 years to get a new consumer thing out into the mainstream where everyone starts making them.