Why no Indian mobile makers? Asks Qualcomm

MUMBAI, INDIA: Qualcomm Incorporated, the global mobile technologies provider, is all set to help Indian mobile firms to build their own smartphones and devices at lower development costs and faster marketing time.

According to Dr. Sandeep Sibal, Qualcomm’s country manager & vice president — Business Development for India & South Asia, the Qualcomm Reference Design (QAD) program decreases the level of complexity in designing and development of smartphones as well as its manufacturing.

“Though there are Indian mobile brands, unfortunately there’s no Indian original equipment manufacturer (OEM) in the smartphone market. However with QAD program, we might see Indian brands to design and develop their own devices as OEM in a year’s time,” Sibal told media in Mumbai today.

For QAD program, Qualcomm is already in talks with Micromax, Karbonn, Lava, Maxx and other local brands, Sibal informed.

The program offers pre-cooked solutions to third-party hardware and software vendors to conduct tests and development for their products on the QRD platform. Besides hardware, the platform provides software applications required for basic smartphone functionality.

Further, the program helps third party vendors to focus on device engineering and development that result in developing high-value devices in volumes with good features.

In terms of support, the program offers hardware design, schematics, printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) and mechanical identity (ID) to local brands. However, the QAD program is designed around the third generation (3G) mobile technologies and devices.

It is linked with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon — all-in-one mobile processor and to drive smartphone ecosystem around the Snapdragon chipset family — S1, S2, S3 and S4. The S4 processor offers speed up to 2.5GHz, support single, dual or quad cores and easy functions in 3G as well as 4G or LTE environment.

Qualcomm launched S4 Snapdragon at the recently concluded Mobile World Congress, Barcelona. According to the company, mobile firms are expected to launch S4-based smartphones and devices in India which would be launched by mobile companies later this year.