Icera may have had a better chip than Qualcomm, but Qualcomm reckoned it hadva better product strategy. The clash occurred back in 2009 at Silicon South-West’s Wireless 2.0.conference in Bristol.
Icera‘s Rick Dingle showed data that its chip out-performs the competition, while also being multi-generational in that its soft modem approach allows it to span multiple process generations.
“We’re the guys that Icera is trying to knock off our perch”, responded Qualcomm’s Ben Timmons, “but we’re coming from a different philosophy to Icera. We’re going for an integrated solution. We’re driven entirely by a belief in integration and that it is always the right solution in the end.”
Timmons instanced Qualcomm’s move on the Netbook market with its Snapdragon 2″ chip-set which enables a device which is always on.
“Here’s your email, here’s your Facebook, it’s always there”, said Timmons, “with all day battery life.”
Timmons showed a slide with customer names for the Snapdragon 2. There were about ten of them including Acer, Asus, HTC and Samsung.
Asked if the Nokia-Intel agreement was something Qualcomm had to take seriously as a competitor in the Netbook market, Timmons replied: “Intel is the biggest and best chip company in the world – we take it very seriously.” He added: “We’re looking forward to the competition. We’re very good at communications; they’re very good at computing.”
Asked if Qualcomm would be adopting a more collegiate attitude in its approach to LTE IP than it adopted at the 3G generation, Timmons replied: “We’re on the chip-set side. We’re just another licensee of Qualcomm IPR.”
