As Google nibbles away Microsoft market share in the phone search and application markets, Qualcomm is starting to take share away from Intel in the processor market. Not helping Microsoft's cause was a poor and somewhat "boring" keynote speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at this year's CES in Las Vegas.
Instead it was Qualcomm who was getting the lion's share of the attention, with several analysts claiming that the new corruption allegations being leveled at Intel by the US Federal Trade Commission and the New State Attorney's Office were set to hurt Intel.
Several vendors including Motorola, HTC, Lenovo, Asus and Dell, all long-time Intel customers, have shown new devices running Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor, which is now fast enough to be used in advanced smartphones and netbooks.
It was quite clear at this year's show that Qualcomm is becoming the chipmaker of choice for some of the biggest names in the business, with Google helping Qualcomm's cause by announcing its new Nexus One smartphone running the new Snapdragon 1.2 Qualcomm processor on the opening day of the show.
BusinessWeek said recently that by getting its chips into a broader range of consumer electronics, Qualcomm is poised to compete head-on with Intel, which is currently the world's No. 1 maker of semiconductors for computers. "Intel and Qualcomm are on a collision course," says Flint Pulskamp, an analyst at technology research firm IDC.
A Gartner analyst said that some vendors who had been intimidated by Intel in the past to use their processors were now keen to move to other processor partners if only to "teach Intel a lesson".
"Our chips are now going into consumer electronics devices themselves," Qualcomm Chief Executive Paul Jacobs said in his first ever CES Keynote, a day after Paul Otellini, his counterpart at Intel, touted his own company's foray into chips for mobile phones. In the first half of the year, Intel will start shipping Moorestown, a smartphone processor, which is set to be used by some European manufacturers who are still developing Windows Mobile-based phones.
