Ahead of its annual Uplinq developer conference in San Diego, Qualcomm has been priming the press with various briefings.

Kicking off with a general overview of business activity was Liat Ben-Zur, senior director, Software Strategy and Business Development.

"We're the only chipset vendor who supports all mobile OSs; something that's crucial for handset manufacturers," Ben-Zur said.

"We're also the only vendor who develops all parts of our chipsets, from CPU/GPU, GPS, memory, RF etc, from scratch."

Thinking mobile

The contrast is with competitors such as Nvidia, which recently bought mobile baseband processor specialist Icera for $367 million, while a year ago, Intel bought Infineon's Wireless Solutions Business for $1.4 billion. They’re trying to acquire and build such capabilities internally.

Qualcomm also points to the fact these companies are coming from the PC space into mobile as being a key advantage for it.

"Our history in mobile gives us a crucial advantage in terms of the tight software integration between hardware and software, in terms of performance and battery life."

"Power performance is the key delta for companies coming from PC into mobile," Ben-Zur explained.

Tasty Mango

One company she highlighted was taking full advantage of such synergy Qualcomm provides is Microsoft; Qualcomm powers all current Windows Phone 7 devices, and will be a launch partner for the new Mango OS update.

"Microsoft now understands the optimisation of the hardware - CPU, GPU acceleration, memory bandwidth - makes a very big difference in terms of how fast your software, OS, browser will work," she explained.

"We're working very closely together for Mango."

Riding the Google wave

Of course, Qualcomm is currently seeing massive growth in terms of Android.

Its chipsets have been in over 130 Android devices from over 30 OEMs making Android devices, while more specifically the Snapdragon chipset is used in 125 smartphones and 10 tablets, with an additional 250 smartphones and 40 tablets in design.

In total, Qualcomm hardware featured in 745 different phones in 2010.

"The numbers speak louder than anything else," Liat Ben-Zur stated.