Exclusive: Qualcomm Fluid, powering the next generation of Windows devices

A few days ago the ‘Nokia Fluid’ and ‘Qualcomm Fluid’ showed up on renowned game developer, Occasional Gamer’s, statistics page prompting a wide speculation that it would be a next generation Windows Phone based Nokia device or something similar. Well, after talking to two Qualcomm insiders I have all the ‘dirty’ details about Qualcomm’s Fluid platform.

Fluid is the codename given to Qualcomm’s latest range of dual core ARM development platforms. One of these is the S4 MSM8960, the dual core processor that destroyed the quad core Tegra 3 and shattered the Galaxy Nexus during benchmarks, all running on Android. Currently Fluid is only officially available for Android so my sources weren’t allowed to reveal much about Windows, but they did mention a few key facts.

Both Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 are currently being tested on it and they’ve seen some impressive results thus far from both operating systems. Nokia and HTC are among the many that have ordered them already, no surprise there as HTC have already used the S4 in the One X. The first Windows based devices powered by it will only appear on the market towards the second half of the year, I’m assuming the fourth quarter as previously rumoured.

When asked about the ‘Nokia Fluid’, the one remarked that it’s just a mobile development platform, thus a universal prototype to test software on. Also, Nokia are working on a tablet using the same technology, they mentioned other ‘big league’ OEMs were also testing ARM-based Windows tablets using Fluid. Two of these include Asus and HTC, who have been struggling in the Android tablet market.

I’m pretty sure everyone wants to see what Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 will turn out like in the end and after seeing what Windows Phone 7 was able to do on a single core processor, I’m sure that the S4 powered devices coming up won’t lose to any Galaxy Nexusses anytime soon 😉