nVidia has taken one step closer to being a major player in the smart phone market. This step is the culmination of their purchase of Icera specifically for their LTE technology. Back when nVidia first announced the purchase it was in direct competition to Qualcomm who is seen as one of nVidia’s major opponents. nVidia new they needed to either license or acquire the technology so that they could integrate a high speed cellular modem into their Tegra SoC for future products.Now things have changed as nVidia has just gotten their Icera i410 LTE modem approved for use on AT&T’s network. This is a nice step forward as they can now move to the next task of integrating this device into Tegra. So far Tegra has been a favorite in WiFi tablets, but due to its lack of LTE of 3G technology manufacturers have needed to go with another supplier to get their devices connected.
This has actually caused rumors to pop up that companies like Asus were abandoning Tegra for Qualcomm when what was really happening was they were putting Qualcomm LTE radios into the devices. Now nVidia can offer LTE speeds along with the performance from Tegra which will make them a better value than buying Tegra and an LTE radio separate. It will also help to prevent the possibility that nVidia might lose customers to Qualcomm as they can provide an all-in-one solution.
Accoding to nVidia we will not see this full integration until 2013 so there will not be any LTE Tegra SoCs out during the launch of Windows RT, but perhaps the delay will allow them to capitalize on the product (Windows RT or Android) that has the best outlook in the market in 2013.
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