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Nokia and Qualcomm to make mobile handsets together

Yes, you did read that right

Nokia and Qualcomm to make mobile handsets together
This was so unexpected, we'll actually just print the first line of the press release: “Nokia and Qualcomm Incorporated today announced that the two companies are planning to work together to develop advanced UMTS mobile devices, initially for North America.”

Yes, two companies who've recently become accustomed to facing each other across a courtroom are palling up. The new devices will be based on Nokia's S60 platform running on Symbian OS, and will use Qualcomm's MSM7xxx-series and MSM8xxx-series chipsets.

The first handsets based on the deal will launch in mid-2010, and will run the upcoming Symbian Foundation platform.

That said, the quotes from the announcement seem to imply that it's not entirely set in stone. “Nokia is very pleased to be in discussions with Qualcomm around designing mobile devices that can benefit from the high level of integration found on MSM chipsets,” says Nokia's Kai Oistamo.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm's Steve Mollenkopf says that “this new level of cooperation would bring exceptional leaps in mobile performance to people around the world... We are very excited about the possibility of the substantial synergies between S60 software and MSM chipsets.”

So, it's still “discussions” and “possibilities”, but even if the subtext of this deal is 'Nokia and Qualcomm agree not to sue each other in this area', it's still substantial progress.

Contributing Editor

Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)