Qualcomm Inc (QCOM)

[khemara_qc]

QCOM predicts phone will be person’s only computer

Etre 2005 But when that comes, so
By Mike Magee in Athens: Monday 17 October 2005, 10:23

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26982

QUALCOMM’S chairman Irwin Jacobs said today that today’s and tomorrow’s phones and PDA matched the power of a Pentium III PC just a few years ago.
And he forecast a time when people wouldn’t have more than one computer, and that computer would be a mobile phone.

More and more capabilities of the chips in a handset are being used for GPS, for cameras, for media, and for supporting DVD style video. And that will grow in the future, he said.

"The key is making a handset indispensable, " he said. If you compare a phone of today with a PC of a few years ago, the memory and processing power is equivalent.to a Pentium III running at 550MHz, he said.

While the storage capabilities of a phone versus a computer aren’t quite there yet, he said that would change in time as Moore’s Law kicked in to the equation.

Other higher capacities of bandwidth in the future would help to shift the movement towards mobile phones rather than PCs. Games, video, and the rest were all eminently suitable for the mobile phone.

We’re not typing this on a mobile phone, however. It’s still a little too small for our clunky fingers and the screen size yet isn’t big enough. And when the screen is big enough and the keyboard is good enough, what difference will there be between that kind of mobile phone and a thin and light PC, the type we’re using?

If such things do arrive, we probably won’t care that much whether it’s got an Intel chip, an AMD chip or any other kind of chip, just as long as it lets us communicate successfully.

Larger screens with lower power consumption and the ability to view full colour in broad daylight were on the way, and downloadable interfaces for graphics user interfaces.

Jacobs said that one problem was loading the cellular networks but it was licensing high power channels to partially overcome these problems. Most metropolitan districts in the US would be able to supply video on demand by the next of year, said Jacobs.

Intel has made little progress, said Jacobs, but has made great effort to stay in the market, particularly with WiMax. CDMA was able to break into a world that was TDMA by having a significant capacity advantage. If you come in with a new technology, it's unclear where that opening may be, said Jacobs.

We used this notebook to call around when we were at Computex in Taipei earlier this year, using wi-fi and Skype and a price that thrashes the mobile phone tariffs. What price mobile phones then? Or notebook computers when they practically do the same?