Thor thin modem powers three new super-fast Aquos smartphones

I follow – with great interest – the growth of the HSPA+ market and the latest crop of high speed smartphones that are launched. These developments enable the fast growing smartphone user base to surf and access online content quickly and easily. With more smartphone users in the networks we, as mobile platform designers, need to be innovative to ensure a smart connection to the network and an optimized design which bring maximum benefits to both operators and users.

We are very pleased to announce that we now power three new HSPA+ smartphones in the Aquos series from Sharp. The Aquos Phone 102SH by Softbank and Aquos Phone SH-01D by DOCOMO are available now by their respective carriers. The Aquos Phone 104SH by Softbank is expected to be available in spring 2012.

These powerful smartphones are based on the small, power efficient and proven ST-Ericsson Thor^TM M5730 thin modem with innovative features and design for great performance. We want to give our customers freedom when designing new their unique style of smartphones. While our aim is to offer the smallest modems on the market, they should of course also be powerful but not power hungry. Thor M5730 is a good example of how we achieve this.

To keep size and power consumption down it has only two chips, one digital baseband with integrated power management unit and one radio IC. The Thor M5730 modem, which brings improvement to the 21Mbps market in size, power consumption and thermal performance is capable of delivering 21Mbps downstream and 5.76Mbps upstream simultaneously, and needs no separate flash memory when combined with an application processor.

The Thor M5730 also supports 64QAM technology, enabling mobile operators to make more efficient use of their spectrum and transfer more data simultaneously, this resulting in a better mobile broadband experience for the consumer.

You can read more about ST-Ericsson’s 21Mbps HSPA+ modems and the features supported here.

Enjoy your high speed smartphone experience!