April 6, 2006 -- As part of its efforts to enable phone makers to deliver multimedia-capable wireless handsets, Agere Systems, Inc. today announced that its mobile phone chipset solutions are designed to support the Microsoft Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, an important feature for bringing easy and convenient music download capabilities to mass-market, feature-rich phones.

Agere's proven 2.5G and 3G mobile baseband chips and software solutions provide flexible mobile processing platforms for quick time-to-market delivery of feature-rich wireless phones. By supporting the WMA codec, Agere can help manufacturers of wireless phones and mobile devices facilitate a rich array of musical content for playback. "Many consumers today will not leave home without their music, and mobile handset manufacturers are turning to bandwidth-optimized Windows Media technologies and solution providers like Agere to help them address this demand for music on the go," said Eric Schmidt, Group Product Manager of Windows Digital Media at Microsoft Corp. "By using Windows Media Audio, Agere's chipset will provide a high-quality listening experience at an optimal file size for mobile handsets."

Agere's Vision X115 solution supports Windows Media Audio 9.1, the format's most current version, which includes specific codecs for multi-channel surround sound and voice encoding. WMA provides both constant and variable bit rate (VBR) encoding. With VBR, the encoding bit rate increases to capture complex sections of data, and then decreases to compress less complex sections, enabling the compact, high-quality audio files required for small-form-factor, mobile devices.