Microsoft is not at CES 2013 with a full exhibit and a press conference of its own but the company will still have a presence in Las Vegas this week. That apparently includes Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, who "crashed" Qualcomm"s CES press conference on Monday.
Bloomberg posted up a video of Ballmer"s appearance as he shared the stage with Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs. Qualcomm makes the Snapdragon processors that run nearly all of the smartphones that have Windows Phone inside. Ballmer showed off the previously launched Nokia Lumia 920 and HTC Windows Phone 8X to the audience. Ballmer mentioned that sales of Windows Phone devices during Christmas week 2012 increased by five times the number that were sold during Christmas 2011.
Ballmer also showed off two previously announced Windows RT tablets, the Samsung ATIV Tab and the Dell XPS 10, that run on Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. Ballmer said that there were now four times the number of Windows RT apps available to download than there were when Windows RT launched and 10,000 apps were added just in December.
It"s interesting that Ballmer choose to make an appearance at Qualcomm"s CES 2013 press conference, rather than NVIDIA"s event on Sunday (NVIDIA Tegra processor is inside the Windows RT version of the Surface) or Intel"s press conference on Monday, which had a ton of Windows 8 PCs and tablets shown on stage.
Source: Bloomberg