Taipei, Taiwan – Qualcomm managed to confuse and confuddle press at its Computex briefing on Monday, as the firm displayed slides showing MeeGo logos alongside other “supported OSes”.
After a Chinese dragon dance performance, the firm, whose A-List execs shunned the show in favor of the company’s own Uplinq conference in San Diego, got off to a stuttering start, bumbling through a few unrelated powerpoint slides showing nothing new.
Rehashing virtually all the news from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Qualcomm’s SVP of product management for computing and consumer products, Luis Pineda, spoke of the company’s innovation, fabless semiconductor competence, design wins and Snapdragon. Nothing new was added to the roadmap, but press were told dual core chips would be sampling in the next few weeks.
Next up was, Jason Zheng, SVP for Qualcomm Atheros in APAC, who talked “connectivity for computing” while showing off a mysterious slide showing tablets alongside an Android, Chrome OS, Windows and MeeGo logo.
“Is Qualcomm partnering with Intel on a MeeGo tablet?” we asked during a Q&A session.
“Qualcomm is happy to work with all our partners,” came the reply. “Yes, but are you collaborating with Intel on a MeeGo tablet?” “Qualcomm will work to enable its technology on all of its partners products,” came the second cryptic reply.
Clarifying matters after the conference, RCR was told by Qualcomm’s reps that what this meant was simply that Qualcomm’s wireless connectivity would work on a tablet irrespective of the operating system, which seems like a rather obvious banality. Almost like saying “This plate will work, no matter what food you put on it.”
“So Qualcomm has not optimized its Snapdragon chip for MeeGo then?” RCR pushed.
“No, we have not” came the curt reply.
Well, in that case, Qualcomm, may we recommend some more careful slide preparation and presentation next time please? Oh, and a virtual copy instead of a tree-killing paper print out would be a nice eco-friendly touch too.
