Dr Irwin Jacobs, one of the seven co-founders of mobile technology giant Qualcomm Incorporated, is retiring from the board of directors at next year’s annual stockholder meeting. He’ll then be given the role of Founding Chairman and CEO Emeritus.

Dr Jacobs served as Qualcomm’s chief executive officer for 20 years, starting from the company’s founding in 1985. He remained as chairman until 2009.

Qualcomm has created a new wholly-owned subsidiary called Qualcomm Life that’ll run the business unit formerly known as Qualcomm Wireless Health.

In addition, Qualcomm has set up a $100 million ‘Qualcomm Life Fund’ for the Qualcomm Ventures group to invest in wireless health projects.

Qualcomm, one of the leading producers of chipsets used in mobile phones, has announced results for the fourth quarter of its financial year.

Revenue was up 39% year-on-year to $4.12 billion, while net income was up 22% year-on-year to $1.06 billion.

Mark Bridge writes:

With Hallowe’en just around the corner, thoughts turn to the departed... and it would be easy to think that the market for feature phones is in the technological graveyard. After all, Sony Ericsson has recently said it’ll be dropping feature phones from its product range in 2012. But perhaps the battle of feature phone vs smartphone isn’t over yet.

Analyst firm Berg Insight says HSPA and LTE mobile technology accounted for 20.6% of the total number of broadband connections on PCs and tablets in Europe at the end of 2010.

The number of mobile broadband subscribers grew by 33% year-on-year in 2010 to 33.9 million and is expected to keep growing to 96 million by 2016. In North America the figures were lower, with mobile broadband accounting for just 13.2% of the total number of connections.