Nokia Preparing Qualcomm Phone

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Nokia and Qualcomm used to be bitter enemies as they waged a war with each other via lawsuits and lawyers. But, now they’re working together and the CEO of Qualcomm let it slip that this year, we can expect Nokia to produce a Symbian phone that’ll be running a Qualcomm processor.

Qualcomm processors are highly coveted, not only do they produce fast ARM-style processors for small gadgets, but IntoMobile reports that their chipset platforms that manufacturers use when developing a new smartphone provide, not only a powerful processor, but GSM/3G connectivity as well as WiFi, GPS and Bluetooth.

Nokia made their mobile Symbian OS open source earlier this year, which is largely being ignored (you’d the the world’s most popular mobile OS going open-source would be a big deal – but I digress). With the source code being open, that gives developers more possibilities. Likewise at MWC, Nokia showed off the new Symbian^3 mobile OS, which is (in layman’s terms) a “finger-friendly” mobile OS for the touchscreen smartphone generation.

This news isn’t just exciting for the possibility of a Qualcomm 1GHz-powered Nokia Symbian^3 smartphone. It’s assumed that Nokia’s software engineers will add support for Qualcomm processors back into the open-source Symbian kernal, meaning that anybody can produce a Qualcomm-powered Symbian phone in the future.

No word on when we can expect this Qualcomm-Symbian-Nokia superphone, but the folks at IntoMobile speculate that we’ll see it late 2010/early 2011.