Qualcomm, the manufacturer of chipsets for phones such as the Droid X, HTC EVO 4G and the G2, has decided to step up from just making chips to making phones. Choosing to work with Android for their phones, the new venture has been dubbed the “Quadroid”, a reference to “Wintel”- the Windows/Intel partnership that has been dominating the PC industry. Qualcomm has been reported to be speeding up the production of their chips in order to have phones ready for manufacture within 16-20 weeks so they can run the newest version of Android (which should be Honeycomb by then). With quite a long time to go before we see the first Qualcomm/Android phone, they’ve been expected to turn up the heat with high performance devices possibly running on dual-core processors. Does the industry need another manufacturer to play the smartphone game? Or will Qualcomm be a breath of fresh air in this overcrowded scene? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
