Qualcomm to Ride LTE Wave with Dual-Core Snapdragon Tablet Offerings

While Qualcomm won’t be releasing any tablets of its own–that we know of–the company did outline its ambitious plans for tablets in 2011 as it intends on riding the wave of the emerging LTE 4G market in the U.S. and abroad. According to the company’s earnings conference call, Qualcomm is actively engaged in ten tablet development efforts. The company didn’t state which specific companies or company that it is working with for the tablets, but we should see at least 10 tablets for 2011. In terms of tablets, Qualcomm hinted at dual-core chips for use in the larger slate-based mobile computing devices.

According to Qualcomm,

In terms of dual core, we have today over ten different companies designing tablets on our dual core solutions, so we feel very good about where they’re going. The tablet space, at this point, it’s difficult to say how big that space is going to be. I’ve seen a lot of different estimates on that, and it will be interesting to see what happens. As we probably talked before, we see that in the developing world being one type of market in the — developed world, you see one type of market. In the developing world, I think will you tend to see a number of different types of devices go in there, mainly because there is no laptop market for them to have to displace. We’ve already seen that with some of our product today.

With the rise of NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 chips in a number of tablets and rumored for a few other unannounced tablets, we’re going to see how the battle for the tablet CPU space will turn out.

In terms of LTE, it isn’t surprising that Qualcomm will be offering multi-mode chips, which essentially will be a chip that will enable devices to switch between 3G/4G LTE on the go. For its part, U.S. carrier Verizon Wireless had announced that it plans on showcasing some LTE products at CES 2011, so Qualcomm’s involvement in the radio modules is not surprising.

Casey Pham
Categories: General
Tags: 4G, dual-core, LTE, Qualcomm, snapdragon, Tablet