There is no doubt that Qualcomm makes awesome hardware. Their old MSM line of processors are present in many major 3G and 2G devices that have been released in the past year. In the meanwhile, their 1 GHz Snapdragon processor has become the processor to have in a mobile phone. The upcoming Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 and a still unnamed Snapdragon device from LG are in the works -both are also coincidentally Android smart phones; a lot of people are eagerly anticipating these phones to arrive.

Qualcomm is also the preferred processor for HTC. These days, the Qualcomm brand gets called a lot when checking mobile phone specifications as you would usually find their process on most high end mobile phones.

Qualcomm does more than produce processors; as a developer and researcher of technological innovations, Qualcomm holds several patents for key mobile phone features. CDMA, which is basically a technology for making a single bandwidth signal hold several streams of data, is a very useful technology that will maximize data transfer speeds. Recently, Samsung has recently acquired rights to the Qualcomm patent on CDMA for 1.6 billion US Dollars.  Samsung will also pay Qualcomm royalties for the next 15 years.

Texas Instruments, another hardware developer; is well known for their Arm Cortex processors. While Qualcomm and Texas Instruments have never been direct competitors, they share the same market in the mobile phone industry. With Samsung already signed up with Qualcomm for the next decade and a half, it is likely that they would also be exclusively using Qualcomm processors.

This is good news, as Qualcomm’s hardware far surpasses that of TI’s. The great thing about technology is that in order to progress, there is no need for competition. Unlike other economies that require competition in order to improve services, innovate products and ultimately, lower prices; technological advancements rely more on a predictable evolutionary direction in which the most useful survives.