Qualcomm's Uplinq conference isn't yet a must-attend event for game developers, although a surprising number were there. (In the interests of full disclosure, Pocket Gamer only attended thanks to a Qualcomm-organised press trip.)

But the chipset company's reach in terms of powering all Window Phone devices to-date, and many Android smartphones and tablets - there are over 250 phones and 40 tablets in design using its smarts - means it has increasing influence over the direction of the entire industry.

Indeed, Qualcomm is changing too, with a renewed focus on providing development tools such as its GPU real-time profilers and power management tools, not to mention funding contests such as its augmented reality competition, and specific games - witness the Southend-developed tech demo-come-Android release Desert Winds.

Throw in keynotes from the likes of Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop, HTC's CEO Peter Chou and HP's SVP Jon Rubinstein, and there was plenty to think about.

So here are 10 things from Uplinq we're still pondering.

1. Elop is turning the Nokia oil tanker, slowly

Has Nokia CEO Stephen Elop been reading PocketGamer.biz? As we suggested post-Mobile World Congress, mobile hardware - especially large touchscreen candybar devices - has become commoditised. Services are much more important, or as Elop more elegantly stated in his keynote address: 'the handset battles are over; the ecosystem war is starting'.

Industry consensus is that Nokia - and by extension Microsoft - have three bad quarters to endure before the scale of Windows Phone devices shipments are sufficient to generate serious revenues for Nokia, Microsoft, operators and developers.

Still, Elop said all the right things, and the industry will be a better place with Nokia-Microsoft keeping Google and Apple more honest with respect to their ecosystems than they currently are.

Perhaps the bigger question is, in what form will Nokia be around in three quarters time? Elop's speech may have demonstrated he's on fire, but as some wags suggested, maybe that's because he's lashed to the mast of a burning boat.

2. Chips with everything

The battle between component manufacturers, integrators and designers is always heated, and effectively religious. And when it comes to future smartphones, tablets, TVs, netbooks, web books, e-readers etc, it's going to get really messy.

Companies such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, Intel, ARM, Imagination Technologies, Texas Instruments, Marvell, Samsung et al all have plenty of skin in the game, and that increasingly means reaching out to developers to make content that highlights their new chips - a key opportunity for high end mobile studios such as Fishlabs, Polarbit, Southend et al - as well as consumer marketing.

Asides from PC-oriented firms Nvidia and Intel, who have always spent big in this area, this trend goes against such companies' engineering focus.

"If I had an extra dollar, I'd spend it on engineering, not marketing," said Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, with the wistfulness of someone who knows he's going to be spending a lot more marketing dollars.

Still, the good news is that this sort of engineering can, to a degree, market itself. For example, Qualcomm called its chip architecture Snapdragon, and the press got excited and marketed the brand organically. The same thing has happened - albeit less organically - with Nvidia's Tegra. Names from other vendors that haven't worked include Hummingbird, OMAP, PowerVR and Mali.

3. All about charge

Hopefully not drinking too much of the Uplinq Kool-Aid (although Ballast Point is good local brewery), one of the things Qualcomm stressed was, as the only chip design company that owns all the component IP it integrates into SoCs, it has an inherent advantage over the competition in one key area - power consumption.

Now, it should be said that Apple clearly has cracked this particular nut too, but with tablet and smartphone graphics effectively equivalent to consoles in terms of available games graphics, the main limiting factor is they're not plugged into mains electricity when being operated.

Expect plenty of research - and developer education with respect to tuning and even game design - to happen in this area over the next 12 months.

4. The web app will eventually win

Qualcomm knows about app stores; it still runs such services for its Brew platform, but philosophically it's much more web oriented.

It's an attitude that's heighten by its support for web standards such as HTML5 and WebGL, both of which it is integrating into its Snapdragon architecture and dev tools. It works closely with Adobe too and is supporting Flash on its new chipset for massmarket devices (put that in your pipe and smoke it, Steve!).

According to Rob Chandhok, president of Qualcomm Internet Services, "Web will win over [native] apps because it's how you reach the largest audience in the most dynamic way."

Still, while HTML5 is described as the "tipping point for web developers be able to target mobile", there's also some frustration in the company that the standard is developing too slowly.

"We thought Apple would have pushed it more," said Dave Durnil, Qualcomm's director of Advanced Content & Gaming. "HTML5 should be coming faster. We are going to do some stuff to bring it into the forefront in the CES timeframe."

In other words, watch this space in early 2012.

5. All together now

One example of Qualcomm's ability to create and disseminate technology throughout the industry is AllJoyn, 'its' mobile proximity peer-to-peer networking abstraction layer.

An open source project, it's a routing technology that sits on top of standard connectivity protocols such as Bluetooth and wi-fi for mobile devices, meaning that developers don't have to worry about them.

At Uplinq, Namco Bandai demonstrated a multiplayer version of Pac-Man Kart Rally , with the mode said to have been added to the existing game in days. Of course, AllJoyn also has plenty of applications beyond gaming.

However, there are some limitations. At launch, AllJoyn will have to have been pre-installed in handsets to enable all features, although Qualcomm says later releases will allow wi-fi connectivity though software alone. Bluetooth peer-to-peer capabilities will always require hardware integration however, which is why Qualcomm is working with several OEMs to get AllJoyn embedded in devices, the focus being Android.

You can find out more about AllJoyn here.

6. Adhoc anti-Apple alliance gains momentum

Placed into relief by the proximity of Apple's own WWDC developer show in San Francisco the following week, it was interesting to note the subtle but strong pro-Android influence at Uplinq.

Particularly in a year in which Windows Phone is in transition awaiting Nokia, Android is the only game in town for the majority of OEMs and ecosystem companies.

Indeed, while Apple is suing Samsung, its prime manufacturing partner, Qualcomm embraced previous arch enemy Nokia, as well as having high level input from the likes of HTC, HP, Adobe, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sony Ericsson, most of whom are Android advocates, and most of whom are fundamentally in competition with Apple.

Throw in devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 10.1, HTC's Flyer and Sensation, even HP's TouchPad and Pre 3 and Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play, and while none may survive a head-to-head comparison with iPad 2 and iPhone 5, the weight of numbers and marginal differences between them will shift the battlelines.

7. Has Gameloft called the dawn of premium paid Android content?

Point 6. not withstanding however, there remains the thorny issue of, Are any game developers making money on Android, and if so how and how much?

Not much light was thrown on the topic during an Uplinq panel talk on the subject, although clearly things are getting slightly/slowly better in terms of features such as in-app and operator billing, the ability to blacklist devices, better discovery and a massive install base.

Aside from a couple of companies however, it's difficult to get a non-anecdotal grasp of how well Android is monetising. One exception: last week Glu Mobile told analysts it was generating around 10 percent of its revenue from Android, and estimating Android gamers were only as third as valuable as iOS gamers.

Still, perhaps a statement from Gameloft's US sales and marketing director Baudouin Corman is significant. He said "Our sales on Android are really taking off strongly."

With no further detail given, it's hard to speculate exactly what this means, although having spent a lot of time and resources porting its key iOS titles, as well as running its own HD Android app store, and working closely with operators, Gameloft would be one of the first companies to experience the maturing of premium paid Android games.

8. Where next with augmented reality?

A perennial fixture on the 'disruptive technologies of the future' list, augmented reality has been heavily backed by Qualcomm. It made its open source vision-based AR tools available for Android last year, running a developers contest to encourage uptake. The tools will be released for iOS soon too.

Yet, there's not yet been a killer app - an 'AR Angry Birds' in the parlance of the day.

Indeed, too many of the winners of Qualcomm's AR competition demonstrated AR is often being shoe-horned inappropriately into existing genres, with little seeming thought for the unique features it can offer.

"Some developers think AR is gimmicky and some think it's the next best thing. I think it's a little early in the ecosystem," pondered Dave Durnil, Qualcomm's director of Advanced Content & Gaming.

"It would work really well for boardgames and card games, for example. There are definitely a few things we can enable on our side to encourage take up, including rolling it into game engines."

9. Let's go massive

Even more ambitious than its work with augmented reality, there are rumours Qualcomm is looking to do something big when it comes to location-sensitive mobile massively multiplayer online games (or LSmMMOGs as I like to call them).

"We're thinking about how can we connect more people to mobile games?" Dave Durnil said. "We're not announcing anything but I think there are some interesting new concepts we can enable."

"I don't think anyone has gone into this market with enough content or focus yet."

10. Blue sky

Any good historian of technology will tell you the things we invent are rarely used in the ways their inventors expected. The combination of innovation and human psychology is much to fluid for simple analysis.

Yet some of the sort of that deterministic thinking which sees the Arab Spring purely as a product of social networks, not deeper socio-economic forces, was on display at Uplinq. HTC's Peter Chou mentioned the Arab revolutions directly, if in passing, while both he and Qualcomm's Paul Jacobs got a bit visionary with talks mentioning a new era in human civilisation and creativity.

Yet, diluted to a less grandiose status, there are some interesting ideas bubbling under at companies such as Qualcomm and OEMs, in terms of how the uniqueness of our mobile devices - as they reflect our lives in terms of data, location, usage patterns etc - can be used in ways, both playful and serious.

Has Angry Birds heralded a new era of human artistic achievement? That's a hard one to argue but equally it doesn't negate the current blossoming of the mobile industry - chips, devices, app stores, monetisation, games and all.