By Seth Clevenger, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the June 11 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
SAN DIEGO — Qualcomm currently is developing an application for Android smart phones and tablets, a company official announced June 5 at Qualcomm’s Vision 2012 Management Conference here.
The product will enable truck drivers to access Qualcomm applications such as hours of service and critical event reporting on their smart phones and tablets, said Greg Frost, director of product management at Qualcomm Enterprise Services.
A driver’s mobile device would connect with a small black box mounted in the cab of the truck, he said. That mobile device would then serve as the display screen for Qualcomm applications, as opposed to installing one of the company’s on-board computers, such as the MCP200 or MCP50.
The product based on smart phones and tablets would be ideal for carriers that “want to take advantage of mobile communications but want to get in at a very low price,” Frost said.
At launch, Qualcomm probably will offer HOS and CER for the product and expand the service offerings from there, he said.
Norman Ellis, Qualcomm Enterprise Services’ vice president of sales, services and marketing, said his company is looking to tap into the growing smart-phone market with more and more drivers now carrying the devices in their pockets for personal use.
“You watch the adoption of smart phones in this country and the predictions of that adoption going forward — it’s incredible,” Ellis told Transport Topics. “A lot of people who are buying those phones are drivers.”
Qualcomm has not yet announced a time frame for the product’s release.
After rolling out the Android product, Qualcomm may also develop versions for iOS and Windows eventually, Ellis said.
