Qualcomm QCOM was the chipmaker of choice for some of the highest-profile tech gadgets unveiled the week of the Consumer Electronics Showâ??in Las Vegas and elsewhere. Not only do Qualcomm chips run the Google GOOG Nexus One smartphone introduced in Mountain View, Calif., on Jan. 5, but they're also under the hood of computers shown off at CES by Hewlett-Packard HPQ. HP and Lenovo are working on smartbooks, scaled-down personal computers, based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor. By getting its chips into a broader range of consumer electronics, San Diego-based Qualcomm is poised to compete head-on with Intel INTC, the world's No. 1 maker of semiconductors for computers.
