A report surfaced yesterday saying that Nokia is interested in Xiaomi’s Surge S1 processor, and the two companies have just announced a partnership, though interestingly enough, the Surge S1 was not specifically mentioned in the press release. The two companies have agreed on ‘business cooperation’ and have signed ‘multi-year patent agreements’, per the press release. This agreement includes a cross-license to each company’s cellular standard and essential patents, and needless to say, this agreement goes both ways.
In addition to mentioning his joy for signing such an agreement with “one of the world’s leading smartphone manufacturers”, Nokia’s President and CEO, Rajeev Suri, also said that he’s looking forward to working with Xiaomi on a wide range of strategic projects. Now, as far as a business cooperation is concerned, Nokia will provide Xiaomi with network infrastructure equipment, which is, according to the company, designed to deliver the high capacity, low power requirements which are expected by large internet providers and data center operators. The two companies will work together on optical transport solutions, IP Routing based on Nokia’s new FP4 network SoC, and a data center fabric solution. In the press release, the two companies also said that they’ll explore further cooperation, on other levels, and IoT (Internet of Things) area was highlighted, along with VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality) and AI (Artificial Intelligence).
As you can see, the two companies did not exactly release any specific details, as to what projects exactly can we expect from them, but it seems like we’ll hear from both companies in the near future, as both of them have access to a wide range of patents, not to mention that they’ll look to work close together on actual products moving forward. As already mentioned, the Surge S1 was not mentioned in the press release, though it is possible that Nokia might use it in its upcoming smartphones, we’ll just have to wait and see what will happen. The Surge S1, for those of you who do not know this, is Xiaomi’s very first mobile processor which is currently fueling only one of the company’s smartphones, the Xiaomi Mi 5c.