According to the latest news on the Web, Redmond software company Microsoft has partnered with the Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek for the development of chipsets that would be included inside future Windows Mobile smartphones aimed to be released on the emerging Chinese TD-SCDMA 3G market.

MediaTek is a developer of chips that feature both support for the Chinese 3G standard as well as rich multimedia capabilities, including LCD resolutions up to WVGA, digital photo snapper resolutions that can rise up to 5 megapixels, as well as VGA video recording up to 30 fps.

It’s a common fact that MediaTek enjoys a strong presence on the Chinese market, especially in the white-box handset area where it accounts for about 80 percent of the chip market segment, and this position is expected to help Windows Mobile-powered smartphones gain a large market share, as some industry sources indicate.

“We are still negotiating about the license fees, but one thing is certain that the price will be very competitive,” says assistant president of MTK. “The license fees are tied up with the shipment.” It seems that MediaTek started to work on the development of Windows Mobile-based mobile phones as soon as July 2008. Back then, Liao Qingfeng, vice president of Microsoft China, had just moved to the company.

According to MTK, the first chipsets for said smartphones are expected to become available sometime in the third quarter of the ongoing year, about the same time the 6.5 version of Windows Mobile is expected to reach the market too.

During the last year, a total number of 16.5 million units of Windows Mobile-based handsets were shipped all around the world, marking a decrease in share, down from 12 percent they accounted for in 2007 to 11.8 percent, shows a recent report published by Gartner.