mobile platform

Refers to hardware/software environments for laptops, tablets, smartphones and other portable devices. Windows and Mac dominate the laptop world, while Apple and Android rule the smartphone/tablet universe. Symbian used to be the predominant smartphone OS worldwide, and Windows Phone is slowly gaining market share.

Mobile Hardware

Laptop computers use x86-based CPUs; however, the overwhelming majority of smartphones and tablets employ ARM processors. For example, Apple's system-on-chips (SoCs) include ARM Cortex cores. QUALCOMM's Snapdragon, Texas Instrument's OMAP, Samsung's Exynos and NVIDIA's Tegra chips are also based on ARM.

Intel's x86-based Atom CPU, which was primarily used for netbooks, moved into the smartphone market with its Medfield system-on-chip (see Atom chips). See platform and ARM chips.

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