Will Nokia go Qualcomm for WP7?

Had a chance to have a private lunch with the Country Manager of Qualcomm last week and our talks revolved around smartphones, tablets and 3G devices (since these are the main business their company is into anyway).

We also discussed how the popularity of the iPad (and the newer iPad 2) might have also spurred the tablet movement with Android tablets coming in at a close second.

The result, more manufacturers turning to Qualcomm to provide them with the chip to power their tablets — and thus the Snapdragon chip came to the immediate rescue. While the upcoming tablets this quarter will feature dual core processors from Qualcomm, the company has already announced their new quad-core chips (how cool is that?) as well.

Then, there’s the topic about Nokia going for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. So far, Qualcomm has 100% market share of all Windows Phone 7 devices — from LG, Samsung to HTC.

The next question is — since WP7 requires some relatively high specs, Nokia will have to push their own chips to go faster or go out and seek readily-compatible processors like the 1GHz Scorpion chip from Qualcomm (similar to what is used in the HTC HD7).

If I am not mistaken, Nokia’s fastest chip on their handset is the one on the Nokia E7, Nokia C7 and Nokia N8 (a 680MHz ARM 11 processor). Going for Qualcomm and using the Snapdragon platform may be faster and easier for Nokia. If that happens, we might be expecting 1GHz chips running on Nokia WP7 handsets in the future.