Texas Instruments Tops New Mobile Internet Device Platform Vendor Matrix Ranking

(Business News & Technology News, 2 Dec 2008)

Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) has been ranked at the top of the latest Vendor Matrix released by ABI Research, which evaluates worldwide MID platform vendors. Qualcomm and Intel Corp., meanwhile, claimed the second and third spots, respectively.

"Certain MID vendors can work with ARM directly if they are used to creating complete designs for their products," notes Philip Solis, principal analyst at ABI Research. "Among semiconductor vendors providing a processor and platform for MIDs, TI and Qualcomm have very different strengths that would be of varying interest depending on whether the MID vendor is typically a handset, PC, or consumer electronics vendor."

The Vendor Matrix is an analytical tool developed by ABI Research to provide a clear understanding of vendors' positions in specific markets. Vendors are assessed on the important parameters of "innovation" and "implementation" across several criteria unique to each vendor matrix.

For this particular matrix, under "innovation", ABI Research examined the speed with which vendors brought products to market, the flexibility of their solutions or designs, bundling of WWAN, WPAN and/or GPS, the use of x86 or Cortex A-8 (or higher) processors, and the products' support for 720p HD video.

Under "implementation", ABI Research scrutinized the following criteria: the vendors' announced design wins, their experience with CE and mobile device vendors, their experience with PC vendors, whether they support all PC operating systems, and whether they support all lower level operating systems.

The MID Platform Vendor Matrix is part of a group of vendor matrices for UMDs. The same criteria for platform vendors are used for all three, but the weighting of the criteria is different for each type of UMD.

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