Qualcomm and Motorola to team up on UMTS phones

Nov 14 2006 - 04:04 PM ET | 3G, Motorola

Qualcomm and Motorola have announced an agreement to collaborate on UMTS handset development. This comes the same day as Qualcomm's president noted that talks with Nokia over patent licensing were not going well. Motorola was already working with Qualcomm for its CDMA handsets. The first outcome of this relationship is that Qualcomm's Mobile Station Mobile chipset has been approved by Motorola for future handsets.

In related news, Qualcomm today announced a single-chip family for UMTS handsets. The chip can support European or American frequency 3G in addition to quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE. Other higher-end features like a 3 megapixel camera, USB 2.0 and modern video codecs are also supported. This technology should help bring 3G to lower cost devices.