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As is often the way, Qualcomm has chosen its analyst day to talk about a few new products. While the initially most eye-catching announcement was a first chipset to support LTE 4G technology, Qualcomm also unveiled another smartphone chipset to add to the already-launched Snapdragon.
Additionally, Dow Jones is reporting another revelation from the day. It says Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs confirmed that Chinese PC maker Lenovo will be the first OEM to ship a mini-notebook based on the Snapdragon chipset - for which Qualcomm is promoting a new category called the smartbook.
The MSM7x30 family of chipsets is positioned to "break new ground in mobile performance in the mainstream smartphone tier." Apart from the fact that we won't see products containing these chips until late next year, the only difference we can see between that claim and what Qualcomm says about Snapdragon (otherwise known as the QSD8x50 family) is the ‘mainstream' bit.
However, MSM7x30 chipsets share the same CPU core - Scorpion - as Snapdragon, as they do other features, such as 720p video, up to 1 GHz speed, integrated graphics with 12 MP camera support, integrated 3G and GPS, and support for Windows Mobile and Android.
Alex Katouzian, VP of product management for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, shed little light on the matter in his statement. "Qualcomm continues to focus on enabling the best possible mobile experiences and this new family of solutions brings an unmatched feature set to the smartphone segment," he said.
One claim made about the MSM7x30 chipsets, but not Snapdragon, is that they support Symbian and Qualcomm's own proprietary mobile platform - Brew. Qualcomm today also announced a renewed push to help development on Brew.
So our best guess is that Qualcomm is trying to push Snapdragon as primarily a smartbook chip and the, presumably cheaper and lower-power, MSM7x30 chipsets as its main smartphone offering. However, we will push Qualcomm for further clarification on this.
