Nvidia Corp. is betting on Microsoft Windows Mobile as the key next-generation operating system for media-rich handheld devices.

The company Monday at COMPUTEX announced a reference deal with Intel Corp. to provide device manufacturers with a solution for bringing these devices to market based on the Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system. This comes after the two companies announced a cooperative effort to deliver a development platform to content developers based on Nvidia MobileMedia platform technology and Intel's latest processor family (codenamed Monahans), based on the third-generation Intel XScale microarchitecture.

The moves, said Mike Rayfield, general manager of the handheld business group at Nvidia, are part of the company’s effort to help establish a standardized platform for mobile multimedia services and applications, just as was done in the PC with Microsoft Windows.

“We believe smart phones are going to be the next wave of interesting high-performance handsets. We also believe that the handset market is starting to look a little like the PC market did 10 years ago in that there really needs to be a standard platform that content developers and standards developers can go off and write to,” he said.

The company currently backs Gartner predictions calling for the media-rich mobile device market to reach a 1.5 billion unit opportunity by 2011. However, with its weighty support – Nvidia being one of the two top graphics card manufactures – the company suspects the market will climb faster than that with Windows Mobile devices featuring powerful graphics taking the lead.

“There’s a real chance that if we do the right platform here, which we believe we’ve done, and enable this market to really take off, it can grow significantly faster than it is projected to,” Rayfield remarked, admitting that Windows Media is currently a small percentage of the media-rich mobile market. “We are clearly betting that this is going to change pretty significantly.”

Nvidia’s MobileMedia platform is a complete development kit containing all of the hardware and software components, with examples for delivering everything from digital TV and video, to 3D graphics for gaming and high-fidelity audio. Nvidia did not release pricing information.

By: DocMemory
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