Mannerisms

It has always been fun to tease Qualcomm marketeers with the question: 'Sold a chip to Nokia yet?'

Now that harmless pleasure may be a thing of the past.

Qualcomm's name was always ostentatiously absent from Nokia's lists of approved chip suppliers, even though Qualcomm is the world's largest supplier of wireless chips.

With the new IP agreement between the two companies signed yesterday, does that open the way for Qualcomm to get its chips into Nokia handsets?

Today I asked Nokia if it would change the habit of a mini-lifetime and buy its chips from Qualcomm. "It removes any obstacle", replied a Nokia spokesperson, "but there's no commercial agreement."

Qualcomm's CEO hints that it has hopes. "This agreement paves the way for enhanced opportunities between the companies in a number of areas," said Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm.

Does that mean chip sales? Well it could.

The agreement signed by the two companies yesterday is for 15 years and covers, among other wireless technologies, GSM, EDGE, CDMA, WCDMA, HSDPA, OFDM, WiMax, LTE.

The significance is in the sheer number of wireless technologies. The expectation is that all will be used, side by side, in the future.

Nokia believes that the evolution of the mobile phone industry has reached a stage at which no particular technology can dominate a generation.

"Many technologies will be used, and it will be very difficult for anyone to dominate," Petri Liuha, laboratory director computation structures at Nokia, told IEF2008 in May.

There had been a fear among many companies in the wireless business that Qualcomm was trying to establish a quasi-monopoly over the wireless industry in the same way that Intel and Microsoft have exercised the Wintel monopoly over the PC industry for 20 years.

With the Qualcomm-Nokia agreement, that now seems less likely to happen.