Uplinq: Dr Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm speaks to Mobile Industry Review

Well then, sitting in the press conference this afternoon at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference I had the opportunity to ask a quick question to the company’s top man, Dr Paul Jacobs. I decided to keep it reasonably light hearted given that time was marching on and that there’d already been a lengthly amount of serious questions from the assembled media.

My two-part question was as follows:

1. What was your first handset?
2. What is your current device strategy?

Paul answered the second point first, tongue-in-cheek amidst some laughter from the audience, explaining that his policy is, “To carry the phone of the customer I’m going to see.”

A very sensible approach. He continued, “I try and carry leading edge devices. For example I have an HTC Thunderbolt running a fusion of LTE 700 and CMDA.”

At this point Paul picked up a Palm Pre 3 that he’d been showing off earlier, explaining, “I keep telling Jon [Rubenstein, of HP Palm] that I’d like one of these.”

“I move around a lot and I want to try everyone’s devices. Every player brings something new to the table and I try and use everything.”

Good man. I would have been rather disappointed if his primary handset was a 5 year-old Brew phone.

As for his first handset?

“That’s a good question,” said Paul, pondering.

“I think it was an OKI analog phone — but of course, I carried all the Qualcomm phones in the early days.”

One of these, perhaps?

Thanks Paul!

(Thank you to Albert who picked up the post on his Spanish site, CanalPDA here)