Ixonos, a Finnish company you probably never heard of, has just announced that they’ve signed a licensing agreement with Qualcomm to use their chipsets as the foundation for a future portfolio of devices that they’ll be building for companies willing to pony up the money to outsource their R&D. Here’s how you should think of Ixonos: Say you’re a handset maker, Mark’s Mobile Phones, and you want to jump onboard the Android bandwagon since everyone and their mother has already released an Android powered device. You could hire engineers to buy Qualcomm development boards, components from various suppliers, and then build a factory in China to manufacture your device, but that would be a lot of work. That’s where Ixonos comes in. Throw money at them and they’ll do all the design work for you, tweak the software, and then give you something you can send to a factory in Vietnam, Africa, wherever, who can start pumping out your new flagship product.
If you think that sounds unimaginative, then realize that close to 60% of Android phones on the market run on the same Qualcomm hardware, but they all feature a slightly tweaked physical design, whether it be size, shape, or form factor, and some even include a custom designed user interface to further differentiate themselves from the competition. “We are already working on our first Qualcomm reference designs and have full capability to offer our customers a full product road map of Qualcomm-based Android devices. Existing and new device-manufacturer and operator customers as well as any company looking for a device creation R&D partner can turn to us for faster time-to-market and high-quality connected devices designed to deliver superior user experiences.” — Folkert Wierda, Head of the Ixonos Device Creation Centre.
The first products hatched in Ixonos labs are due to hit the market in the first half of next year. The irony of all this is that much of the talent that was let go by Nokia are probably now working on these future Android handsets.