ST-Ericsson scores a contract to end Qualcomm's chipset exclusivity on Nokia Windows Phones

It's apparent now that Microsoft is giving Nokia more wiggle room than to other WP manufacturers, since Qualcomm was the exclusive chipset provider until now. ST-Ericsson is the other mobile silicon maker besides Qualcomm, which integrates the baseband radio in their chipsets, making for a complete SoC. 

Nokia has long held a relationship with the company, whose chips are found in many handset of the world's largest phone maker by volume, so it feels like a natural extension of the partnership. Granted, this might be geared towards invading the emerging markets, especially China, where ST-Ericsson provides chips with TD-SCDMA basebands, like on the dual-core HTC Sensation Z710t for China Mobile, which uses ST-Ericsson's dual-core NovaThor chipset.

NovaThor is offered in many flavors, including with combined LTE/HSPA+/TD-SCDMA modems, it uses ARM-Mali 400 GPU, like Samsung's Exynos, and supports the usual goodies such as 1080p video encoding and decoding, 3D imagery capture support, and as far as we grasped from the white papers, is more power-efficient than NVIDIA's Cortex-A9 offering, for instance. It's probably safe to assume that ST-Ericsson will be mainly powering low- to mid-range Nokia Windows Phones, most probably for Chinese market, but still, it's nice to have options.

source: ST-Ericsson via MarketWatch