Google Nexus One - Skyworks, Qualcomm & BroadCom Winners

I love the group at ifixit.com who is always one of the first ones to buy new phones and tear it down to the chip level to see who is powering the guts of the latest phone. They did the Google Nexus One tear down last week and Qualcomm seemed to be a big winner with at least 3 chips including 2 processors and a power management chip.

For us RF geeks, Broadcom supplies an 802.11n WiFi chip giving the device high capacity WiFi access which is not enabled in the current iPhone. Skyworks is supplying the critical GSM power amp (SKY77336) and just announced this big win with a press release. They are also on the iPhone so they have been getting into the high profile phones. They are on the HTC reference design so this should get them into a lot of the Andriod based phones as HTC is manufacturing them for several companies. Looking at the Motorola Droid tear down; however, TriQuint and Avago are listed as the FEM chips.

The initial sales numbers for the Nexus One seem very minimal as it was kind of a soft launch. It seems the phone is primarily purchased online from Google with a T-mobile account or as a full priced unlocked phone. Google does not seem concerned with selling a large number of units but rather just showing off the capabilities of Android so that other manufacturers will emulate the phone in the way they think it should be done.

Do you think this strategy will pay off? Will any current handsets compete with the iPhone??