Celebrating the company's 25th birthday this year, Qualcomm's CEO Paul Jacobs was in London to set out the firm's stall in the increasingly complex and competitive mobile devices world.
Some of his themes have remained consistent through much of the mobile chip giant's quarter century, notably the obsession with integration, but these days an integrated platform contains a whole new range of components and a hefty dose of software.
So the software strategy shared center stage with the silicon, as Qualcomm stressed that its 2011 roadmap is not just about GHz and cores, but optimizing the architecture for multimedia, multiple operating systems and new services.
Some of the technologies showcased by Jacobs and his team have proved long-lived, often against the odds. This includes CDMA itself - Qualcomm stressed several times that it would not do single-mode LTE chips and believes the 4G technology only achieves its potential in tandem with the 3G technologies, all CDMA-based.
This also includes the software platform Brew, which has received a new lease of life and is positioned as a web/apps system for affordable handsets, fitting in below smartphone OSs. With both AT&T and Verizon Wireless supporting Brew MP in this context, it was with some justification that Qualcomm gave Brew a key role in its presentations.
It is also working hard to ensure its Snapdragon processor, and other technologies, deliver a strong user experience for smartphone OSs.
Jacobs and Qualcomm's head of internet services and Brew, Rob Chandhok, both seemed to be making a bid for the position of Intel in a mobile version of the old Wintel alliance, stressing that Microsoft had chosen Qualcomm as its lead partner for Windows Phone 7, and more importantly, that it has a deep collaboration with Google for Android.
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Qualcomm tightlipped about Nokia smartphone
The Snapdragon-Android axis really does have a shot at being the “new Wintel” - in the third quarter of this year, 17 devices based on this combination launched from 11 vendors, and of commercially available Android devices, as of August, 44 were based on Qualcomm silicon and nine on that of competitors.
Snapdragon uses Qualcomm's own-designed ARM core, Scorpion, which is more heavily focused on multimedia performance than vanilla ARMs. It had a head start in the market for gigahertz processors (though Nvidia has beat it to dual-core with Tegra 2), and the efforts to optimize Android performance on the processor have paid dividends.
However, Snapdragon will have tougher challenges going forward. Enrico Salvatori, SVP and general manager of Qualcomm Europe, reiterated that the 1.5GHz Snapdragon, and the dual-core version, would appear in devices in the first quarter and first half of 2011 respectively.
But in the same timeframe, there will be several rivals this time around - Tegra 2, the dual-core high end OMAP from Texas Instruments, Samsung Orion, and of course the wild card, Intel Atom.
If Qualcomm and Google want to be the new Wintel, the real Intel is still searching for its new Microsoft. Nokia is the best candidate, as the two firms promote their jointly owned operating system, MeeGo.
Qualcomm was quiet about Nokia, a surprising contrast to last year, when it was fresh from announcing the end of legal hostilities and a customer deal with the market leader.
Nokia had been expected to launch a Qualcomm based handset this summer. In various slides listing its high level OS partners, Symbian appeared on the margins of just one, even though Qualcomm is a member of the Symbian Foundation and Salvatori claimed the relationship with Nokia was still strong.
But there is increasing suspicion that the expected Snapdragon-based Nokia phone will not appear this year (and perhaps, in light of Intel and MeeGo, never).
However, Qualcomm is more interested in the other Nokia OS, MeeGo. Chandhok said this was an "interesting concept" though there was nothing to announce as yet.
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Qualcomm tightlipped about Nokia smartphone
MeeGo would seem to see Intel taking Qualcomm's own advice and optimizing a software platform for its own architecture, and this would presumably make it hard for Qualcomm to take a key role.
However, it would certainly disrupt its larger rival if it could achieve better MeeGo devices than those on Atom, and lure Nokia that way. If the Nokia deal does not materialize on significant smartphones, Qualcomm faces a big challenge to maintain Snapdragon's momentum.
As the Koreans get serious about smartphones and other mobile web devices, and Nokia gears up for a revival, Qualcomm will need to go on the offensive again.
One area where, like many of its rivals, it sees strong potential is in tablets. Qualcomm and Freescale had defined their own hybrid PC/phone format last year, which they called “smartbook.”
As well as facing some legal problems from a German firm actually called Smartbook, this concept, and name, has been largely eclipsed by the keyboard-less tablet.
Qualcomm was quick to adapt to the new situation, with Jacobs saying the architecture was suited to a wide variety of form factors and the smartbook was never envisaged as being confined to products with keyboards.
He admitted only a few smartbooks had come to market, notably from Lenovo and HP/Telefonica, but believes Snapdragon will show up well in the expected wave of new tablets that will appear soon to challenge the iPad.
This article originally appeared in Rethink Wireless
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Qualcomm tightlipped about Nokia smartphone