Qualcomm Chief Financial Officer, Bill Keitel, told an audience at the Morgan Stanley Tech, Media Telecom Conference that during the first fiscal quarter of 2011 they achieved operating margins of roughly 30% on chipsets. That figure is going to dive down to somewhere between 22% and 24% by the end of this year and such a move is being done intentionally.

Now why would they do such a thing? Would not it make more sense to continue making money hand over fist and keeping it in the bank for a rainy day, similar to what Apple does? Keitel says: "To help the market come about, we made the decision to come to market earlier at a lower price than we could have." He goes on to say that over the next few years this mid-20% operating margin figure is going to be the norm.

On the topic of research and development, Keitel says that 17% of Qualcomm revenue will go towards making sure they stay on top of their game. Right now their focus is on ramping up 28 nanometer chips and of course accelerating their time to market for new hardware. NVIDIA beat Qualcomm, quite embarrassingly, at being the first to ship a dual core processor. Unlike NVIDIA however, Qualcomm gives their customers a completely integrated platform that comes with a CPU, GPU, and all the various wireless radios needed to make mobile phones and tablets. Lets not forget the other players, Texas Instruments scored a design win when LG decided to use them for their first 3D capable smartphone.

Cupertino patent watch website, Patently Apple, has recently discovered a new gem from Cupertino that describes methods for dynamic creation of video ringtones. The technology is said to allow users to combine sound and video from various sources to automatically create custom audio-visual alerts for incoming phone calls.

There are multiple ways this patent pending feature can do its magic. For instance, visuals could react to associated audio in a manner iTunes’ visualizer does. In another example, the technology can assemble a layered composite from multiple video or photographic sources and then independently animate them [images and videos] based on the characteristics of the audio track. The visuals support both 2D and 3D effects, including movement, appearance, shape and differing camera angles.

The patent also talks about the so called signature information about a particular song or video, which could further alter the visual experience for the recipient. Moreover, it allows for displaying of links to relevant content, while at the same time enabling some sort of social networking services that would include users sharing songs and video clips with the people they are calling.

Symbian developers will probably want to sit down for this. In a deal that would go through by the end of the month, Nokia will sell the Qt commercial licensing to another Finnish company, Digia, but says that they will continue to invest in the platform.

Qt is available under both a commercial and an open-source licenses and is a key component of cross-platform development for mobile platforms but also for the desktop. Nokia will focus on open-source development and expansion of the platform but Digia will take over the commercial licensing and services and around 3500 customer companies will be transferred to Digia.

The deal should not affect developers of open-source software that uses Qt and Digia is a "recognized Qt innovator" who will be looking to improve the functionality and support. For more info, check out the Qt Blog, which has an interesting write-up on why the Digia deal is a good thing.

Still, after Nokia dropped Symbian/MeeGo as its primary platforms in favor of Windows Phone 7, devs cannot be too happy about the deal. They should be able to continue their work as usual, but Symbian/MeeGo is really starting to play second fiddle to Nokia interests.

Geeksphone made a minor splash back in 2009 with the introduction of the Geeksphone One, an Android slider that came out at a time when Android sliders were still a tad on the rare side and it was all happening by way of an unknown independent European firm, to boot. Well, they are coming back for round two with the Zero, said to be launching soon and Android Francelooks to have a jump on pricing and specs.

The phone clearly on the low end of the range with a 600MHz processor, 256MB of RAM, a 3.2-inch HVGA display, though it gets brownie points for a 5 megapixel autofocus cam and Gingerbread out of the box. Pricing looks aggressive, too: the site claims we will see it for €189 ($265), though early buyers will get a €179 ($251) special and previous owners of the One will get it for €168 ($236). Pre-orders will allegedly kick off within a couple weeks.

We occasionally cover concepts for mobile phones they may never leave the drawing board, but their designers often dream up of interesting new features that might one day make it to actual devices.

This design is by Baek Kil Hyun and it called 360 Compact Mobile Phone. His imaginary product implements two flips that are also displays and do what the iPad 2 Smart covers do, except… they are better.

Anyway, the 360 Compact Mobile Phone features a protective cover on the front, which splits into two equal pieces. They flip open to reveal the screen and are in fact screens themselves.