Are problems with Orange's BlackBerry Bold Marvell's fault?

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	Are problems with Orange's BlackBerry Bold Marvell's fault?	By Sindre Lia, 10 October 2008

GALLERY

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Many questioned Marvell's move of acquiring Intel's XScale PXA series a few years ago, but will they return with a vengeance with the BlackBerry Bold and Storm?

Back in 2006, Marvell announced the acquisition of Intel's aging XScale PXA series of processors, which at the time only worked with EDGE networking. Hence, the BlackBerry smartphones didn't offer 3G UMTS. Marvell soon thereafter announced a new chipset series, which is now being used in the BlackBerry Bold and the Vodafone version of the BlackBerry Storm.

Although the BlackBerry Bold is rumored to be released in the U.S. October, it remains to be seen how well this new chipset works with the BlackBerry platform. Another notable Intel XScale customer, Palm, recently released the Palm Treo Pro, featuring a Qualcomm chipset. Obviously, they had come to the same conclusion as Intel: The XScale PXA series will not define mobile computing in the years to come.

Recently, Orange decided to pull its own BlackBerry Bold off the market, referring to software issues as the reason for its actions. Software issues, yes, but caused by what? The fact that both Orange and AT&T are having problems could mean that the Marvell chipset is making the BlackBerry platform unstable. Now, 3G issues have been confirmed as the problem.

What's next? An unstable BlackBerry Storm for Vodafone customers? Only time will tell.

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