Yeah, NV's bet seems to be on Windows Mobile 6.1 and, more specifically, 7.0 though. The latter looks
rather nice. I do not agree with that bet for a variety of reasons, but I think for this SPECIFIC chip it is a good strategy because:
- Symbian is specific to only a few manufacturers (or carriers); if you know in advance you won't get design wins there for political reasons or whatever, it's not worth bothering with the OS.
- Non-Android Linux is too fragmented, and Android's user interface isn't advanced enough to really benefit from a 3D GPU; this will change in time, but the APX is too high-end for initial Android phones.
- Windows Mobile 7 is promising and, more interestingly, WM will remain important in the PDA market. It's not a lot of units, but NVIDIA has had success there and maybe they think they can get design wins again in that category.
- Unlike TI and more like Samsung, NVIDIA is also focusing on Personal Media Players and Personal Navigation Devices. These markets will either use proprietary OSes (so NV's strategy is fine there) or, less frequently, Windows Mobile.
However, I would be very disappointed if:
- NVIDIA's lower-end derivatives later this year and their future high-end next year didn't support Android.
- NVIDIA wasn't willing to work with customers with proprietary OSes, such as Apple and RIM, or those using Symbian.
NV claimed to already have 4 design wins at 3GSM (or more specifically, 4 companies where they had design wins); that amounts to one PMP design win (likely Sansa), one PND/GPS design win, one unbranded mobile phone design win (likely at an US carrier) and one branded mobile phone design win (likely at Motorola or HTC). I don't know whether they have more by now, obviously, but certainly that's what they are working on.
