While Taiwan is clearly an important country to chip and device makers, US carriers look to the island for innovation too, with AT&T scouting the computex show in Taipei earlier this month for new phones to add to its network.
“At AT&T we’re looking for new devices to add to our network each and every day,” Michael Stice VP of the carrier’s business development for emerging devices told RCR.
“We’re looking to take our customers beyond smartphones and handsets,” he said noting that the operator was looking into any types of devices it could attach to its network. “Computing devices seems like a reasonable place to start.”
Stice said AT&T sent teams to Taiwan at least a couple of times a year to visit the OEMs and ODMs in the country.
“A lot of the technology and the interest in the space really starts from here,” he explained adding “we come to learn about what the trends are, about what the devices are going to look like, a year from now, six months from now, we try to bring that into our portfolio, and really bring the best of technology back to our customers in the United States.”
Convergence between the mobile and computing space has become a strong theme in the industry and Stice said AT&T was keenly interested in looking at how some of the Windows on ARM products would develop. “We’re very excited about trying to understand what the ecosystem’s going to do to develop products in that space,” he told us.
The industry, said Stice, needed to carry on delivering innovation and differentiation to handset buyers, asserting that AT&T was committed to figuring out “the best of those choices that we can get into the hands of our customers.”
RCR also learned that AT&T is keeping its eye on Intel’s prospects in the industry too.
“There’s a lot of smart folks at Intel trying to figure out how to break into the mobile space and make it big and sell their next several million chipsets, I think eventually they’ll do it,” said Stice, noting that while the firm had “not quite cracked the code” just yet, had “no doubt” it would get there eventually.”
“We need them to be there,” he added, “they’re a very strong ecosystem partner as well.”
