At last week’s Mobile World Congress Shanghai event, Qualcomm pushed aside its legal troubles with Apple and others, and sought to back up its claim to be the “de facto R&D arm of the industry” with a swathe of new chips geared to targeted expansion markets such as automotive and wearables. That self-description, used by the company’s general counsel Don Rosenberg in response to Apple’s most recent allegations, is less hyperbolic than it would be in most organizations’ mouths. Qualcomm does harness its huge engineering resource to be at the cutting edge of new developments in wireless chips, but it will inevitably be harder to retain that position when it has to compete in many different sectors, rather than relying…