Ericsson launches platform for multimedia devices

Ericsson announced its U500 mobile platform, a next generation architecture with a triple processor solution and a powerful multimedia subsystem, enabling new multimedia functionality and advanced multitasking capabilities. The U500 will not only pave the way for new consumer services, but also improve the usability and quality of existing multimedia services.

“The U500 is a powerful multimedia platform with performance, graphics and usability, more resembling a mobile computer than today’s mobile phones,” said Robert Puskaric, head of Ericsson’s mobile platforms business. “With the U500 platform Ericsson will keep its world leading position within the multimedia mass market for years to come.”

The U500 mobile platform is a response to the rapidly growing demand for advanced multimedia features and services requiring enhanced user experience. Designed for mass market mobile devices, the U500 is capable of groundbreaking features such as high quality camcorder, 12 Mpix camera, WVGA displays, advanced 3D gaming and 3D user interface, CD quality audio performance and high resolution video for a true mobile TV experience.

The Ericsson U500 mobile platform combines raw power through the implementation of three ARM11 CPUs and hardware accelerators, with state-of-the-art platform architecture through the integration of the digital baseband and an advanced multimedia companion chip into a single-die processor. The result is a powerful multimedia platform that is smaller and more cost efficient than what is currently available.

The advanced graphics capabilities available in the U500 are enabled through the implementation of ARM Mali200 GPU, a programmable, OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics processor producing fast, high quality graphics with the low power consumption required for a handheld device.

The U500 will be commercially available in the first half of 2009.