I think what he's saying is that If you're going to build a phone operating system, then there's a lot of work involved between launching a phone operating system and having hundreds of millions of the them out in the market. Symbian's first operating system running on ARM was launched back in 1996 or 1997, and here we are 10 years later and Symbian has a majority share of the smartphone market. There's a lot of water under the bridge, it takes a lot of R&D to get there. I think he's just pointing that out.

IDGNS: What is ARM's place in the iPhone?

The iPhone is based on ARM11 and things like Google phones and iPhones do create demand for high performance devices. I think it's inevitable if the iPhone continues to be as successful as it appears to have been on launch, there will be iPhone II, III, whatever. And hopefully, if we do our job right, then they will be based on future ARM products.

The ARM11 is a microprocessor we first delivered to semiconductor licensees in 2002, so it's actually quite elderly technology.

IDGNS: Makers of computer microprocessors such as Intel and AMD have focused more and more on emerging markets and low-cost laptop PCs. What's your view on this market and how might the mobile phone side of the tech industry compete against the computer guys?

East: The ARM view is that those sorts of markets are probably better served by something evolved from the mobile phone end than something evolved from the PC end. Another thing you have to remember is that the ARM architecture itself was originally developed for a PC, the Acorn PC, and it had some good differentiation about it compared to the IBM standard PC. The Acorn had a fixed ROM (read-only memory), so the OS was inviolate, no viruses because it couldn't get any because it was in ROM, and there was no fan because it was in ROM, and the processor was very power efficient. And we've taken that architecture and applied years of R&D expenditure to it and it's still very applicable. If you wanted to build a product which you could call a computer, you could build it from the phone end.

There are Linux-based computers out there that are based on ARMs and behave in a simpler way than the PC and if that's the way the market evolves, then we're more than happy to see it evolve that way. If the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) wants to evolve from the mobile phone end of things, we'd welcome that. There are a handful of products out there that look a lot like the old Acorn PCs that are very robust.

The reason developing devices from the mobile phone end is better is that because of its low power heritage, the battery is an easier concept to deal with. I can have more power, a longer battery life, a lighter battery ... I can have more reliable products because I don't have to have a fan to go wrong, I can have more reliable products because it doesn't get as hot and therefore it's cheaper as well, fundamentally a lot cheaper. Therefore reliability, low cost, are sort of automatic derivatives from the mobile phone.

Another automatic derivative of mobile phones is connectivity. And the sort of built-in disposition of the designers to build a communication device rather than a display-based device. I know PCs are almost all connected to the Internet now, but the connectivity is bolted on, it's not part of the design.