Does your 4G Device Communicate of Compute?

Cell phones provide texting, email, browsing and picture taking capabilities. Many consumers think of their phone as a computer while the computer manufacturers see computing opportunities for mobile internet devices. What leading applications will drive manufacturers to build a cell phone that computes or a computer to communicate? In a 4G world, how many devices is the consumer willing to own?

Babak Beheshti of Sandbridge and Al Petrick of Skycross talks about the issues of the market drivers.

All the phone growth is in smartphones, with 31% CAGR and all of them are WiFi enabled.  HSPA, LTE, CDMA, etc, do not have the ubiquity that WiFi has.

Software Defined Radios enables a lot of complexity to be masked in the management of the standards. The use of SDR puts the antenna into DSPs in a way that drastically reduces the go to market time almost by half.

Nokia is moving to 50% hardware, 50% software and moving away from Symbian.

Garmin offering a mapcentric phone competing somewhat with OnStar.

Netbooks are 5M worldwide going to 60M in the next three years.