Looks like the Toq smartwatch isn’t Qualcomm’s only announcement today. At the chipmaker’s Uplinq conference in San Diego, CEO Paul Jacobs also announced AllPlay, a wireless audio streaming tech based on Qualcomm’s Alljoyn software framework. Like Apple’s AirPlay, the technology lets the user stream music from apps to compatible speakers, receivers or other devices. One of AllPlay’s first partners is Rhapsody, and Jon Irwin, president of the music service company, came on stage with Jacobs to demonstrate streaming Rhapsody tunes to several different speakers in the room.
Other AllPlay features include the ability to play different songs on different speakers and you can even have separate volume controls for each. According to Jacobs, AllPlay-compatible audio equipment is coming and an AllPlay SDK should be out before the end of the year. There’s no word yet on which hardware maker is on board. Nevertheless, it does seem like the media streaming space just got a lot more competitive.
[Image source: GigaOm]
Taking a page from the “PC development” book, Qualcomm was demonstrating its latest Open GL driver which can turn 2D games into 3D without intervention from the developers. This demo is running with an Adreno 225 GPU, which can now be commonly found in high-end smartphones like select HTC One handsets or Samsung Galaxy SIII handsets in the USA. In this demo, the Adreno 225 powers a 1080p glasses-less 3D tablet display from master image, which looks much better than their 720p equivalent. When it comes to glasses-less 3D, resolution does matter a lot. 
At Uplinq I met representatives of Samsung who are promoting the LPDDR3 memory designed for the next-generation smartphones and tablets. LPDDR is also known as “mobile DDR” and it is a type of memory that can consume 10X less power in standby mode, when compared to typical “PC” DDR3 memory. Obviously, this is a big deal because most of the time, your smartphone is in standby mode, doing very little. Many smartphones currently use LPDDR2.
Today is rich in development news with Google IO (San Francisco) and Uplinq (San Diego) happening at the same time in California. Both overlap on the Android front, but Qualcomm had a message of its own to developers who attended the company’s Uplinq conference in San Diego: “Snapdragon is the processor of choice for developers” – that’s basically what Qualcomm’s CEO Dr. Paul Jacobs was going for. Qualcomm had some facts to backup their claim: most LTE smartphones in the USA are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 chip, and we expect this to last for the remainder of 2012. 