Ericsson this week put out a press release on its U335 WCDMA mobile platform that was regurgitated across the press, with little or no thought. Since when does Ericsson define handsets?
Well pretty much since May when it cut a deal with TI to design a handset specification that the TI OMAP 3 applications processor would support, to allow HSDPA, HSUPA and LTE devices to work best with the dominant share of Ericsson base stations that it expects to sell with those technologies in over the next decade or so
It looks to us that the U335 is the first reference platform and it should have the effect of making it cheaper and easier to bring new devices to market, opening the market up to the big Chinese ODM manufacturers.
But in featuring ‘mobile TV’ on the list of features that the U335 can help with it strikes us that this is almost certainly the same specification that will allow MBMS on a handset. Granted it could have been referring to unicast cellular video, but we don’t think so. For a start the delivery time frame from these new devices are second half 2008, and that would put it in the right timeframe for Ericsson pushing software upgrades to base stations that will make MBMS TV services possible. Also in January this year Qualcomm demonstrated MBMS working with a HSDPA chip in a Huawei demonstration to Hong Kong operator PCCW, so it seems like a perfect opportunity to add the MBMS capability to the chip at the same time as enabling HSDPA. Well at least one other vendor thinks so.
Ericsson said the U335 WCDMA platform was the first to enable mass-market HSPA multimedia devices capable of new services such as mobile TV, mobile video blogging and other services demanding both high uplink and downlink data speeds.
So if we are right, the big question that everyone asks about MBMS, notably ‘where are the handsets going to come from’ is answered, and the feature will be automatically enabled to anyone using this specification.
Ericsson said that the U335 differs from Ericsson’s previously announced HSPA platforms, which have focused primarily on network access for PC-card products and high-end feature phones. The U335 is for all segments of the market, it insists.