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A Lack of Alternatives To Qualcomm Is Hurting the Ecosystem (androidauthority.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Authority: Smartphone enthusiasts are probably eagerly awaiting the arrival of Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 835 SoC, which was unveiled back at the beginning of January. However, recent revelations suggest that consumers could be in for an unexpected wait, and we're unlikely to see an alternative manufacturer step in to fill the void given the current market conditions. The report claiming that LG G6 won't ship with the latest Snapdragon 835 flagship SoC is looking like bad luck for LG and a blow to consumers looking to spend their cash on the latest mobile technology. If true, this is also likely to have an impact on sales, as consumers hold out for better technology released in just a few months time. It's not only LG facing this prospect though, HTC, Sony, and all the other manufacturers that typically make announcements early in the year look to be facing a situation where they will be using the same processor as last year for early 2017 models. This scenario is unprecedented in modern Android history. The past few years have seen manufacturers kick start the year with flagship releases packing new processing technology. Unfortunately for these OEMs, there aren't any competing processors to use as a direct alternative to the delayed Snapdragon 835. The choice is then either to launch with an older technology or delay their product until the 835 is ready. While many will focus on performance stagnation, using the same chip also means that handsets are bound by the same feature sets, and so camera, video, virtual reality, and other capabilities won't be moving on either. Samsung's Exynos and HiSilicon's Kirin series are the closest SoCs to the 821 and 835 in terms of performance and features, but these are primarily reserved for their maker's own flagships and aren't rolled off the production line in anything close to enough numbers to meet global demand. This situation is a bit of a catch-22, with manufacturers unlikely to buy up expensive foundry lines without a strong indication that OEMs will use their products, while a lack of availability means major releases can't pick up these chips.
If you want to break Qualcomm. Shut off CDMA. Any manufacturer can make a GSM Phone. CDMA is Patent controlled by QualComm.The issue is; alot of USians that are on CDMA Networks, don't know they are on CDMA Networks.
I don't have much sympathy for this current state of affairs. Consumers voted with their dollars, Qualcomm delivered, and firms that integrate Qualcomm products into their flagship devices developed no fall-back. With such a piece of technology fraught with so many singe points of failure, it was just a matter of time before the ecosystem collapsed.
I'm interested to see what the latest lawsuit against Qualcomm will do for the ecosystem, too.
The vast majority of people are just looking at the brand name, interface, memory and user-facing features when shipping at a phone. If they spare any thought at all for the CPU, it's just a vague sense of satisfaction that the CPU running at a faster clock speed or has more cores than their current phone.
If the new phones are released with the same CPU as the current generation, nobody will give a shit and the people who were going to buy them will still buy them.
Where is the IBM PC of the mobile world? When will enterprising developers be able to program these mobile computers with as much freedom as they had during the burgeoning era of personal computers?
The ecosystem is hurting, because it is being denied the process of evolution by variation and selection; walled gardens, government-granted monopolies, government-induced backdoors, etc., are all leading to a stagnant wasteland of mediocre, purposely broken solutions to problems that nobody has, and a lack of solutions for the problems that people actually do have.
or more accurately, unrealistic expectations. Or marketing.
Qualcomm announced the 835 when? LG announced the G6 when?
Did anyone believe that LG would be able ship the G6 a month after the chipset was announced...?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
your phone will still work. Stop trying to make Qualcomm out as the single factor with which the whole smartphone market stands and falls with. Their products are replacable.
So the App designers can invent new and creative ways to phone home with my datas
Rick B.
Think of the shame of it! Buying a brand new 'flagship' phone, only to realise it's got an old processor in it, used in the previous model. You never know for sure it's not even a pre-owned processor, and no one buying a £700 phone wants anything pre-owned about it. That CPU might have been extracted from some chav's phone and used to send instagram pictures of his willy to his chewing-gum consuming girlfriend.
Is it just me, or is this some 'not-news'? Buy a phone that does what you want it to, not one which has an entirely different parts list than the last one. This implies that mobile CPUs are now at something of a plateau, and so in fact, any number of manufacturers could enter the market to make cheap, commodity processors without fear of 'progress' eating too much of their R&D spend.
Baby seals and whales don't use cellular phones therefore your point is invalid. Of course, this may change over time as IP68 becomes more commonplace.
Pandas have very little use for cellular devices due to poor data access. Rather like the nutrient in bamboo, it is a bandwidth issue.
No. The main think making updates hard is the device drivers have to be updated and tested.
It may need to be change when the kernel is updated. Its the testing that's the real hurdle.
This is actually the problem when the OEMs are all Chinese. The Chinese give 100% of their business to whoever gives them the lowest price, so it does these competitors no good to remain in the business if all they are gonna be doing is being used to beat down Qualcomm's prices. And Qualcomm's salespeople ain't morons either: after the competitors have exited the market, they can easily tell the Chinese phone makers 'Take it or leave it'.
In fact, the Koreans do exactly what you describe - second source. They'll have a BOM w/ 2 sources, and while they use both sources to keep each other honest, they will never give all the business to 1 source. Usually, they'll give up to 60% of the business to one, and 40% to the other, if it's just two. That way, if one of the suppliers drops the ball on them, they can ramp up numbers at the other, and it's less painful to go from 40 to 100 than it is to go from 0 to 100, and they'll always keep looking for multiple sources.
Hopefully, one of the advantages of some manufacturing coming back to the US would be that manufacturers would use multiple sources for their products rather than just try to beat down prices
That's not true, Android indeed does support x86, and other architectures as well, like MIPS and PowerPC. In fact if you look around, you can find devices running all of these, especially Intel in the case of Android TV.
The reason nobody ever makes Intel based phones is for several reasons, including the fact that Qualcomm makes the best modems and they are far more energy efficient than Intel.
Au any rate, you are correct that the GP is somewhat wrong. CDMA is used on basically all cellular networks, including GSM. GSM originally went with TDMA for voice and data (aka 2G) but it's very inefficient so CDMA is what GSM uses for 3G. And then of course, OFDMA is used for 4G.
There are competitors to Qualcomm in the ARM SoC space available to other OEMs though, namely in the form of Nvidia's tegra line, which I don't believe anybody else has mentioned.
Why doesn't Samsung do more with its Exynos processor and become a much bigger competitor to Qualcomm?
Qualcomm's major advantage is their patent portfolio allows then to bake in all the CDMA/GSM/3G/4G LTE modems in with the CPU, GPU Wifi and Bluetooth. The Snapdragon SoC's implement damn near the entire cell phone in a single chip that can be used across all carriers. The carrier's underlying network technology doesn't matter because the Snapdragon supports all of them, and with one hardware version. That ne plus ultra sustains Qualcomm's hegemony and relegates Intel, Nvidia, MediaTek, etc. to Wifi-only devices.
Android indeed does support x86, and other architectures as well, like MIPS and PowerPC.
It supports whatever Linux does because Android is just a bunch of user space code that runs on Linux.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.