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

Dr Paul Jacobs of Qualcomm

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?

Screen shot 2011 06 01 at 15 50 01
An OKI CDL700E mobile phone, via retrophones.com

Thanks Paul!

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

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