HTC Sensation Z710t for China Mobile uses ST-Ericsson's dual-core NovaThor chipset, Qualcomm weeps

ST-Ericsson has been trying to get in the smartphone game for a while now with its dual-core chipsets, which, similar to Qualcomm's offerings, represent true SoCs, with integrated baseband radios and all. It's been shopping the ARM-based chipsets now mainly to Nokia for its Windows Phone 8 handsets next year, since the Finns are a huge customer of its baseband and other silicon.

It seems that the company finally managed to score a big brand name in smartphones to put its new chipset in a flagship device, albeit bound for the Chinese market. China Mobile uses its homebrew TD-SCDMA standard, and ST-Ericsson has come to the rescue with its 1GHz dual-core NovaThor A9500 platform, which comes with the usual goodies like 3D capabilities, Full HD capture and playback, advanced browsing and so on.

The HTC Sensation Z710t is probably the first brand name flagship smartphone to use an ST-Ericsson SoC, and it shares the same specs with the HTC Sensation 4G, but for the chipset, of course. We'd love to see some benchmarks and battery life numbers from this newcomer to gauge the performance.

This has probably been a China-specific collaboration between the two companies, because of the TD-SCDMA radio. We doubt that HTC will look for alternatives to Qualcomm, which is its minority shareholder to boot.

source: ST-Ericsson via Reuters