As Google steps up its Android One program, which aims to accelerate uptake of its platform in emerging smartphone markets, there is a bitter battle building between MediaTek and Qualcomm on the system-on-chip front. MediaTek scored the first point and is powering the initial Google handsets for India, but Qualcomm is close behind, and their head-to-head is no longer just about the entry level, but what the Taiwanese company calls the ‘super-midmarket’, where the challenge is to squeeze as much as possible – eight cores, embedded apps, 64-bit and LTE – into a mid-priced package.
The Taiwanese firm traditionally offered little threat to the mobile SoC leader, focusing on low end handsets which were beneath the notice of high-margin Qualcomm. But smartphone growth has shifted to emerging economies and the main handset battle is to pack as much functionality as possible into a device priced as far below $200 as possible.
This challenge has seen MediaTek moving rapidly up the technology food chain, going head-to-head with Qualcomm in many 3G and 4G features, and squeezing the US giant on price. Always swift to respond to a threat, the larger company has unleashed a series of SoCs with high end features – most recently LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation – but targeted at entry level smartphones.
Google gave MediaTek a huge boost when it made the firm its first Android One partner, though Qualcomm has now joined the initiative too. Nonetheless, it is a MediaTek chipset which powers the first commercially available handsets under the emerging markets program, which was originally unveiled earlier this year at the Google I/O conference.
The initial products are targeted clearly at India, a more open market for Google than the other huge growth area, China. While many Chinese vendors and operators are deploying their own web services and brands, squeezing Google out even where they are using Android, in India there is high uptake of Google services, and a widening vacuum left by the former dominance of Nokia Symbian and Series 40 phones.
So the first Android One handsets come from three Indian partners, all previously announced – Micromax, Karbonn and Spice. All are using MediaTek chips. However, Google also announced new backers for its program, which indicate a broader focus in future – they include Qualcomm, plus a raft of handset makers (Acer, Alcatel OneTouch, Asus, HTC, Intex, Lava, Lenovo, Panasonic and Xolo). The next target markets for Android One will be Indonesia, the Philippines and South Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), which will all see the handsets by the end of this year. More countries will follow in 2015.
Android One provides reference designs to make it cheaper and easier for OEMs to design and produce low cost smartphones, which of course will feature the standard Google user experience and so place its services and advertising on center stage, for users who are often using the mobile web devices for the first time. This is a clear attempt to impose a more common, Google-centric experience in new markets than the search giant has achieved in mature mobile areas, or in China. Android has been fragmented by OEMs and operators creating their own overlays and even building alternative platforms which exclude Google’s products, Amazon and Baidu being the notable examples.
For the SoC makers, reference designs put pressure on margins – especially for a premium firm like Qualcomm – but deliver huge volumes and the potential to work closely with Google to influence future directions (a strategy also adopted by Intel, though it does not currently feature in Android One).
MediaTek has scored the first points, since its MT6582 SoC is present in all the first Android One devices. The SoC is based on a quad-core ARM Cortex 7 processor with the chipmaker’s CorePilot technology, which is designed to make multitasking easier and to prolong battery life. The chipset also integrates a UMTS Release 8 modem and multimedia functionality for audio, video, graphics and camera.
Mohit Bhushan, VP of US business development at MediaTek, said in a statement: “By collaborating extensively with Google on Android One, we are enabling a total solution that encompasses hardware, software and testing, for manufacturers and brands globally.”
Important as high volume initiatives like Android One are to market share, the even more important battle will be higher up the value chain, in the growing space for midmarket LTE handsets. Here, Qualcomm went aggressively after MediaTek last week with its latest LTE chip for entry level models. The Snapdragon 210 will be accompanied by reference designs for low cost LTE tablets, to add to Qualcomm’s existing smartphone reference platform program, which has been focused in particular on China. Via Android One, Qualcomm and MediaTek both have the chance to look beyond China and expand in other growth territories such as India and Indonesia.
The Snapdragon 210 is a multimode 3G/4G SoC which Qualcomm co-president Cristiano Amon said will enable sub-$100 smartphones. The company said the 210 was the first multimode 3G/LTE processor for the low end, and it certainly packs in the LTE features, with seven modes as well as carrier aggregation and LTE Broadcast. It also has dual-SIM support and full HD playback with hardware HEVC. Handsets with the 210 processor are expected to be available in the first half of next year.
Amon said last week: “The mobile revolution is really just starting. Once networks reach a certain speed, people become more dependent on their devices. So when everyone has a smartphone and LTE connectivity, that’s when the revolution begins.” The 210 runs on a quad-core CPU with Qualcomm’s Adreno 304 graphics processing unit and camera support up to 8-megapixels.
These products are targeted head-on at MediaTek and the segment it is aiming to define – what it calls the ‘super midmarket’. In this area, the Taiwanese player is not only hurling eight-core SoCs at the space, but also its embedded software initiative. For the past three years or so, MediaTek has been embedding more and more functionality directly into its processors to enable lower cost devices which can still support key web functionality. It has embedded Facebook and Twitter, and its latest move it to put Opera Max, the super-efficient mobile browser technology, on its 64-bit LTE system-on-chip (SoC).
This will allow phonemakers to offer devices which reduce users’ data costs without needing to install additional software, and is part of MediaTek’s aggressive bid to make 4G devices almost as affordable as 3G, pushing up volumes and allowing it to challenge Qualcomm in what the US vendor might have hoped would remain premium territory for a while to come.
One of Opera’s key differentiators, in a world where many smartphone vendors now offer their own browsers, has been its data compression, and its ability to perform much of the processing of web requests in the cloud. Both these help deliver a good web experience to users with low end storage, processing power and connectivity. But they are also important to those with more powerful 4G phones and connections, to reduce data bills.
Opera Max extends the technology behind the Opera Mini browser to all the data passing through a handset, not just that being used by the browser. And MediaTek is taking that a step further by making it part of the chipset itself, as it has already done with Opera Mini.
In addition to compressing video and other data by up to 50% and making more efficient use of handset resources, the app will allow users to monitor their data usage through its dashboard, issuing alerts and advising on how to change settings to lower fees.
The first chipsets to get Opera Max are not low end affairs, but are targeted at the boom market for affordable 4G handsets for emerging markets and prepaid customers (which MediaTek calls the ‘super-midmarket’). They are the 64-bit, 2GHz Cortex-A53 SoCs, the quad-core MT6732 and octa-core MT6752.
Jeffrey Ju, general manager of MediaTek’s smartphone business unit, said the partnership was targeting “powerful and affordable chipsets to help manufacturers spur smartphone adoption in the super-midmarket – a new market structure comprising an unprecedented volume of premium midrange devices worldwide. We want consumers to fully enjoy the 4G LTE multimedia experience while minimizing data costs associated with powerful smartphones.”
MediaTek’s software partnership program has been growing steadily, though in the past it has mainly been geared to producing integrated reference designs for ultra-low cost handsets with functionality, such as social media, embedded. Early supporters included Microsoft, with Facebook joining in late 2011 and Twitter in 2012. MediaTek embeds mobile internet services using its MAUI runtime environment (MRE), a middleware technology designed to help developers deploy services and content. Yahoo was the first web apps partner for MAUI, embedding Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Flickr, News, Weather, Finance, Cricket and Answers. The platform targets featurephones, Java and Android.