MediaTek may not have the sex appeal that Texas Instruments does with their OMAP processors or Samsung does with their Exynos chips, but they’re a player you need to watch with a close eye. Every year more and more devices are made by “other”, meaning manufacturers you wouldn’t necessarily rank in the top 5 in terms of volume. Who are these “other” folks? Companies that build bootleg devices using MediaTek chips. Until now MediaTek only made baseband chips (read: modems) that can do 2G and 3G. Back in July 2010 we wrote about a deal MediaTek made with DoCoMo to get access to their LTE baseband hardware and software and thought to ourselves that nothing would really come out of it since anything with a MediaTek modem inside is typically a NOKLA being peddled on the streets of Shanghai. Looks like we were wrong. At the 2011 Mobile Asia Congress, ZTE showed off an Android 2.3.4 smartphone with an 800MHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 4.1 inch 854 x 480 pixel display, and 5 megapixel camera that supports TD-LTE, TD-SCDMA, GSM and get this … it even takes two SIM cards! It’s got a MediaTek chip inside.
Now should Qualcomm be scared? They are, after all, the world’s leading suppliers of baseband chips. What makes Qualcomm different though is that they build complete system on chips that pack everything one needs to build a smartphone; the GPU, CPU, and baseband. Thing is, most folks that buy MedaiTek equipped devices really could care less about LTE and 3G since their network either doesn’t have it or charges and obscene amount for it. With China Mobile, the world’s largest operator, due to turn on their TD-LTE network at some point in 2012 however, that’s a ton of lost business for Qualcomm, who worked their ass off to make sure that their S4 processors support nearly every single network standard to ever hit the planet (except WiMAX).
Anyway, good to see MediaTek doing their thing and sticking it to the man.