SemiSerious

The Mobile World Congress has wrapped up, and there were plenty of interesting things to see and new announcements made.  But unfortunately I was stuck at SI’s booth fighting off the hordes of people clamoring to learn more about our semiconductor analyses   I did, however, make it out of the booth long enough to present with my Portelligent colleague, Jeff Brown, about the “Evolution of the Smart Phone - Systems to Semiconductors”.  While it started a bit slow with only two non-SI/Portelligent people there at the beginning, it was standing room only in a hot, noisy room by the time we concluded, which was fabulous!  A lot of questions were asked as well, which is always a good sign that people liked what you had to say instead of just wanting to bolt for the doors once you stopped speaking.
 
The presentation examined three smart phones from HTC (Universal, TyTN, and TyTN 2) and compared/contrasted them with three smart phones from Nokia (N90, N93, and N95).  Jeff covered the system level side of the presentation where he talked about the different feature sets and overall board sizes.  One of the interesting areas that he discussed was how HTC came into the smart phone market as a PDA vendor, so they had a full blown (and large) first offering, and then had to figure out how to meet the phone market criteria, the big one being size.  On the flip side, Nokia entered looking at a phone and had to grow to compete in the smart phone arena with the successive offerings, mostly in terms of functionality.  In the end, the two latest offerings from both companies are quite comparable from a system level point of view.
 
This is where I took over and looked at some of the components that made the phones functional.  One thing that surprised me was how loyal both companies were to the component manufacturers.  Many people think that cost is king in cell phones, and this may be true for entry- and mid-tier offerings, but other than changing the Bluetooth from TI to CSR, the major components for each company remained consistent.  Looking at the different chips that were used, my conclusion was that HTC had a very efficient design where they removed duplicate functionality from devices and were able to dramatically reduce the number of chips used in their phones while still increasing the functionality.  Nokia’s phones resulted in a very effective design, taking advantage of the economies of scale that a company of that size has at its power and they have a great opportunity to optimize in the future.
 
A copy of the slides can be downloaded at www.semiconductor.com/mwcpres.

- Gregory A. Quirk

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