Sunday, July 17, 2011

Samsung Chooses VIA over Qualcomm for DROID Charge's CDMA Chip

South Korean mobile phone maker Samsung Electronics has reportedly decided to use a VIA Telecom chip for ensuring the CDMA radios on its DROID Charge handset instead of launching the smartphone with a chipset coming from Qualcomm.

The DRIOD Charge is Samsung's Android-based smartphone that landed on shelves at Verizon Wireless in the United States only a few months ago.

According to a recent report from DigiTimes, Samsung's move might be the beginning of an assault on Qualcomm's lead on the CDMA markets in the country and in other areas of the world.

At the moment, the DROID Charge is said to include both the said CDMA chipset from VIA, as well as a series of proprietary components from Samsung, such as the baseband chip for 4G LTE radios.

“We have been following Samsung's decision-making closely for some time, and we see a trend towards using suppliers from closer to home, in the East-Asia region,” James Mielke, ABI Research VP of Engineering, stated.

“For example, the RF for both CDMA and LTE in this phone is supplied by Korea-based vendor FCI,” he continued.

The research firm believes that Samsung's decision to adopt another chip for one of its high-end devices would be a significant shift in component sourcing strategy.

Chances are that Samsung would not include the VIA chipset only in the CDMA devices that it plans on releasing on the United States market, but that it would make a similar move for all handsets it launching with this 3G standard on board.

“While the choice of VIA Telecom is not critical if restricted to this one model, if a similar switch away from Qualcomm chipsets occurred across all Samsung's CDMA phone models, it would represent a real challenge to the market's status quo,” Mielke added.

However, Samsung did not offer specific info on the matter, and chances are that DROID Charge would be the only handset it released on shelves with VIA components inside, though it remains to be seen whether new similar devices are on the pipe as well.