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Dell takes second step towards making mobiles

Dell has announced a deal with Qualcomm to use its Gobi chips.

 These give both EV-DO as used by Verizon and Sprint (which is what Qualcomm call 3G) and HSPA (which is what the rest of the world calls 3G).

Initially this is to enable high speed mobile data on Dell laptops. It looks like the first step towards Dell becoming a mobile phone manufacturer. It isn’t.

That first step happened over a year ago when Ron Garriques, then President of Motorola Mobile Devices, took one of the company jets to Texas for a job interview with Michael Dell. Ten out of ten for chutzpah.

Garriques is now heading Dell’s consumer devices division.

What makes it seem likely that Dell is going mobile is that Garriques has hired his friend Mike Sudol. Sudol was a Vice President at Motorola based in China and responsible for the Linux touch screen products years before anyone had heard of phones from Google or Apple.

Sudol fell on his sword at Motorola when he was found guilty of insider trading in Cisco – where his brother worked. Motorola has a hard-earned whiter than white resputation on Wall Street so, despite his brother taking all responsibility, Sudol was found a job at Compal.

Compal happens to be a supplier to both Motorola and Dell.

He’s now on board with Garriques. A Linux dPhone can’t be far away.