"It looks like the Koreans are revolting against the royalties that Qualcomm has been extracting for some time," said Will Strauss, principal of market watcher Forward Concepts. "Both Samsung and LG have long chafed at Qualcomm's royalties," he added.
Samsung is already sampling its mobile WiMAX chipset to engineers in and outside the company. The Korean giant wants to be among the first to launch LTE handsets, but whether it will use its own LTE baseband in its first models is uncertain.
The company will support both WiMAX and LTE for next-generation cellular networks, Chi said in his San Francisco talk. Between the two technologies, WiMAX is as much as five years ahead in maturity, but LTE will ultimately be more broadly used, Chi said. "We are also trying to develop competitive multimedia chipsets to support various multimedia functions," said Chi in an e-mail exchange following a presentation in San Francisco in early December.
Samsung also plans to develop its own lineup of mobile GPUs in a bid to avoid the increasingly expensive licensing fees associated with using either ATI or other third-party mobile GPU technologies. The company plans to begin production at a newly opened Texas plant with no details on a release timeframe. Samsung also plans to be one of the first handset manufacturers to support LTE, but it has not clarified whether it will use its own chipset in the first handsets scheduled to be available at the end of 2009