Qualcomm is looking at South Korean wireless and healthcare technology firms for possible investment, Chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs told Reuters on Wednesday.

A startup called Zeebo is betting that people in emerging markets want to play good video games just as much as people in the US, Western Europe and Japan do. Zeebo plans to launch its "video game console for the next billion" in Brazil next month for US$199 and other countries later in the year for US$179. It was developed using the cell phone technology of Qualcomm.

The succession of Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs to the post of chairman, replacing Irwin Jacobs, garnered headlines on March 3. Not so widely reported was the younger Jacobs' plan to take a 25% reduction in salary for fiscal 2009.

A South Korean trade commission has taken what could be a first step toward regulating wireless chip vendor Qualcomm's business practices in the country.

For a long time, Intel counted Advanced Micro Devices as its chief rival. These days, it's looking more like Intel and Qualcomm will be going mano-a-mano. While Intel says it retain full control of the process—essentially leaving TSMC as a contract manufacturer—the move clearly is aimed at stealing market share from British chip designer ARM, which licenses it products to Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Freescale and other companies.

A source at China Telecom revealed recently that Qualcomm has decided to lower CDMA patent licensing fees for Chinese manufacturers--possibly even lower than the patent licensing fees levied by the WCDMA camp. Specific fee rates have yet to become clear.

Qualcomm's four-year, $350 million effort to design a chip that goes into small notebooks and handhelds will come to fruition next year when device makers deliver products based on the Snapdragon processor.

Research shows that this trend towards power-hungry applications is only set to continue. According to Strategy Analytics, voice call, MP3, FM radio and other handset activities are forecast to remain relatively constant through 2015. However, the use of multimedia functions will increase.

The i6-Goal has been created by local phonemaker QIGI and mobile software developer TechFaith Wireless Communication Technology. The latter is likely to have a key input into China Mobile’s plans to create its own take on Android, and this could, in turn, enhance the influence of Qualcomm, which has come out as a major supporter of the Google system.

Qualcomm has has stopped development of its next-generation, high-speed wireless technology Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) which was originally intended as an alternative to LTE and WiMAX 4G telecomunications standards.

Things were looking better for Qualcomm than they had in a long time. Demand for its technology has been strong, and it had finally settled a long-running royalty dispute with top mobile phone maker Nokia. But that was before the economy started really falling to pieces, dragging the wireless-chip maker down with it.

Qualcomm’s fiscal fourth quarter results were boosted by payments from its recent deal with Nokia, but it was cautious about 2009, highlighting the pressure on the CDMA market and on handsets in general.

Last year, the ITC ruled that certain new models of 3G wireless handsets with Qualcomm chipsets could not be imported because they infringed on a Broadcom patent. An appellate court stayed the ban in September, pending appeal. On Tuesday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the ITC's ruling about the patent's validity. However, it reversed the import ban because Broadcom filed a complaint only against Qualcomm. The ITC could not ban products made by "downstream manufacturers."

Broadcom claims Qualcomm has double-dipped on its patents by charging a fee for the use of its technology and another fee for its use in combination with another product. It's a practice that is referred to as patent exhaustion. The lawsuit "further asserts that these practices constitute patent misuse that has brought Qualcomm a financial windfall and brought harm to the industry and consumers," Broadcom said in a statement. In addition to licensing its technology, Qualcomm also makes chips for phones using the same IP.

Are Qualcomm patent royalties an unfair tax on cellphone makers? Or have they helped the industry? Those questions are at the heart of a high-stakes trial that begins in a U.S. courtroom in Delaware Wednesday. Cellphone giant Nokia, which says it has paid more than US$1 billion in royalties to Qualcomm since the 1990s, believes it is paying too much.