Broadcom Smartphone Solution Supports All Three Open OS's

Broadcom Corp. will support the three most popular open operating systems on its third-generation cellular design platform during a demo at the Mobile World Conference. The platform can support Symbian, Windows Mobile, or Linux on a single monolithic chip, powered by its BCM2153 dual-core High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) processor that features dual ARM CPUs. According to a company release, it will help drive the proliferation of devices based on these operating systems that comprise 90 percent of the smartphone market. "Last year, we introduced the BCM2153 to essentially eliminate the price premiums for smartphone products," Michael Civiello, Senior Director of Marketing for Broadcom's Mobile Communications line of business, said in a statement. "Since then, we've aggressively added support for not one, but all three of the most popular open operating systems to further ease the development of smartphones as their market share doubles over the next few years." As the 3G cellular landscape continues to evolve towards higher speed mobile connections, the market is moving to HSDPA. HSDPA handsets typically require additional processing capabilities to support open operating systems like Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux, which can support the applications enabled by these faster network connections. Market research projects that smartphones will represent 22.2 percent of the cell phone market by 2011, compared with 11.1 percent this year, according to a company release. At the Mobile World Congress, Broadcom will show the Symbian OS software platform, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and a Linux implementation based on LiMo Foundation specifications running on the BCM2153 platform.