Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM), which is known more for cellphone chips than products sold to consumers, is betting that a new pocket-sized device will spur more interest in mobile TV.

The San Diego-based company late Tuesday announced that a subsidiary will begin offering what it calls FLO TV Personal Television. Qualcomm said U.S. retailers are expected to offer the device over this holiday season at a suggested price of $249.99.

FLO TV is a wholly owned Qualcomm unit that operates a special network that broadcasts TV signals, rather than having users call up video programming using conventional cellular networks. So far, the service has been available on specially equipped cellphones.

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Shares of chip maker Broadcom (BRCM) fell in after-hours trading last night and are down again today despite the fact that the company yesterday exceeded Street expectations for its Q2 and forecast above estimates for the current quarter.

A note from JMP Research’s Alax Gauna sums up the bear case for the stock. Gauna writes today that Broadcom’s beat was aided by a $65.3 million payment from Qualcomm (QCOM) as a result of a settlement reached between the two back in April.

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There’s been buzz about Apple’s (AAPL) interest in microprocessor designers ever since the company bought the Silicon Valley startup P.A. Semi last year. But there’s ample evidence that the company’s hiring of chip-heads started much earlier, and is continuing. The question: what is Apple going to do with these guys?

One goal of CEO Steve Jobs is pretty clear–developing powerful, energy-efficient microchips for its iPhone, iPod touch and other future devices. Postings by Apple’s recent hires on the Web site LinkedIn include plenty of people who previously worked at cellphone chip makers, such as Texas Instruments (TXN) and Qualcomm (QCOM).

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Qualcomm (QCOM) announced that it will pay Broadcom (BRCM) $891 million over a four-year period to settle their long-standing patent dispute. The deal settles all existing litigation between the companies. Each receives certain rights to the patent portfolios of the other company. Terms of the licensing revenue model for Qualcomm’s 3G and 4G patents are unchanged.

The two companies agreed not to assert patents against each other; Broadcom also agreed not to sue Qualcomm’s customers over products that include Qualcomm chips in cellular prodocuts.

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Jokes dreamed up by tech companies for April Fool’s Day may not be spectacularly funny. But one can’t help but notice the level of effort put in, which sometimes seems to rival the intensity of their product-development efforts.

Qualcomm (QCOM), for example, has a very slick video on YouTube that initially seems to be a typical piece of corporate B-roll hyping the latest development out of their labs. Then it turns out they are discussing putting cellular base stations on pigeons to form a flying wireless network, which prompts the need to develop a beast called the wolf-pigeon to defend the network, which inspires the creation of a shark-falcon to control the wolf-pigeons, and so on.

Amazon.com (AMZN), reacting to the gaseous conversations about a trend known as cloud computing, contends in a Web posting that it has a new high-level offering in the field–on a blimp. It’s called “the Floating Amazon Cloud Environment, or FACE for short. Using the latest in airship technology, we’ve created a cloud that can come to you,” the company writes.

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Tessera Technologies (TSRA) shares have fallen nearly in half in late trading after the company announced that the Administrative Law Judge overseeing its patent infringement case before the International Trade Commission asserting violation of its wireless patents by a group of semiconductor companies had found no infringement.

The company said that the Initial Determination of the judge upheld the validity of the patents, but found no infringement. Tessera had asserted infringement against the ATI Technologies unit of Advanced Micro Devices, Fresscale Semiconductor, Motorola, Qualcomm, Spansion and STMicroelectronics.

Tessera said it is “disappointed” in the ruling and will review the decision before determining its next steps.

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Qualcomm (QCOM) CEO Paul Jacobs this morning said in an interview on CNBC that customers are keeping their cellphones for longer than they have in the past. That’s a troubling development for the handset business, which relies heavily on replacement phones for revenue growth.

“We’re seeing some evidence there’s a lengthening of replacement cycles,” Jacobs said.

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In landing a new chief executive for its troubled mobile device business, Motorola Inc. is clearly banking on the old adage that “you get what you pay for.” Sanjay Jha, the co-chief executive of Motorola, managed to seal a compensation deal that The Wall Street Journal estimated could be worth $94 million, including restricted stock, options, base pay and a special payment. That’s more than nine times what he was earning at Qualcomm Inc., his previous employer, and would put him easily in the upper echelon of the country’s highest-paid CEOs, according to rankings by Forbes.

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Qualcomm (QCOM) shares are lower this morning after a German patent court hearing an infringement case against Nokia (NOK) ruled that a Qualcomm GSM patent is invalid. As it happens, a key U.S. case between the two companies begins today in Delaware.

As Reuters notes this morning, Qualcomm wants Nokia to keep paying a royalty rate of close to five percent of revenue, but Nokia contends the rate should be lower.

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We often cover semiconductors that require less energy, but we rarely talk to the companies behind those chips to find out what else they might be doing to reduce their power consumption. However, Norm Fjeldheim, chief information officer for Qualcomm, recently shared a few tidbits about what the cellphone chip maker is doing to keep corporate consumption down–and it all starts with information technology (not everyone is jumping ship to build “cleantech” firms).

While it was some 20 years that the Qualcomm IT department instigated a recycling effort that’s still in effect on the Qualcomm campus today, it is within the last five years that Qualcomm has made its biggest strides. In 2004 it began construction on a new corporate building and attached a data center to the corporate offices.

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