Sunday, March 16, 2014

Smartphones seen to boost mobile commerce


MANILA -- Smartphones, which deliver a computer-in-your-pocket experience to consumers, is going to be a key catalyst of growth of mobile commerce (m-commerce), according to major processor manufacturer Qualcomm.

"The computing, graphical and connectivity performance of these devices have increased dramatically over the years, allowing developers for the first time to design applications and services," Qualcomm public relations manager for Southeast Asia and the Pacific Adrian Fu said in a recent email interview with ABS-CBNnews.com.

With its increased transmission speeds and capacity, Fu believes long-term evolution (LTE) technology will enable consumers to experience smoother and faster m-commerce services.

"Certainly, however, the performance of any LTE network is heavily dependent upon the level of infrastructure deployment, as well as the amount of contiguous spectrum an operator has," Fu said.

LTE requires at least 10 MHz of continuous spectrum in order to deliver a reasonable service.

As mobile users increasingly demand richer streaming media entertainment experiences, Fu pointed out that the modem will become a crucial element in delivering that experience.

Furthermore, Fu said modems will have a major role in the continuous development of networks by supporting all the latest communication technologies and adapting to network conditions and user needs.

In response to the growing needs of the market, Fu said Qualcomm has introduced its Gobi modems for industry connectivity solutions.

Fu noted that Qualcomm was the first to commercialize carrier aggregation in Snapdragon 800, enabling CAT5 speeds (150mbps) in fragmented 20 MHz spectrum.

"Our RF360 front-end solution enables for the first time a single, global LTE design for mobile devices, as it tackles the complexities associated with the wide range of radio frequencies used to implement 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE networks," Fu said.

"With RF360, consumers will now roam on LTE technologies in most parts of the world."

"For device vendors, this means greater cost efficiencies as they are able to reduce the number of variations of devices needed to be designed—simply to address the different frequency band requirements among different regions of the world," Fu added.

He claimed Qualcomm Snapdragon to be the leading portfolio of mobile processors, noting that Snapdragon processors are best-in-class technology designed from the ground up specifically for mobile, including custom CPUs, GPUs, modems, DSPs, navigation and system level management software.

In 2013, he reported that more than 1,000 devices were announced and/or commercially available, with many of them making their way to the Philippines.

"With our recent announcements of Snapdragon 801, 805, 610, 615 and 410 processors, Qualcomm is in an excellent position to capture more device wins in 2014," Fu said.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com