Look out Intel and Microsoft, chip maker Qualcomm is squarely on your turfs.

San Diego, California, company Qualcomm is extending into the PC and PC applications businesses. It's a natural move for the mobile chips maker that built its business and reputationon blending digital engineering and mobile communications to create bigger mobile pipes,

In an analyst meeting Thursday, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said his company can no longer reach big improvements in mobile bandwidth through improvements in radio physics.

Most of the gains in mobile communications have been incremental as evidenced by so-called 3G and 4G services, which tend to be just percentage points faster than their predecessors, he said.

“We are now going to be more application-focused, where we design a specific technology for a particular application such as MediaFLO,” Mr. Jacobs said.

MediaFLO is Qualcomm’s mobile TV technology. The company built, and is in the process of extending, an expensive mobile TV network based on its MediaFLO standard.

“In the past we would just build a bigger, fatter pipe and that worked for everything, but we can’t do that anymore, so in MediaFLO we can do things like switch channels faster or have a lot of channels in a small amount of bandwidth,” he said.

Qualcomm, whose chips are used almost exclusively in mobile devices, on Wednesday introduced Kayak, a PC-style device that will do just about everything a PC can do, but it will run on 3G networks. Kayak will be powered by Brew, Qualcomm’s mobile operating system. (Qualcomm Plans PC for 3G Networks)

Kayak will evolve to support Snapdragon, a Qualcomm chipset that is emerging as a major rival of Atom, Intel’s chipset designed for ultraportable PCs.

On Thursday Qualcomm rolled out a dual-CPU Snapdragon single-chip technology that targets more advanced mobile computing devices than its predecessor.

“We have spent so much R&D integrating computing capability into the phone chipset that now we are going the other way,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Now we are able to take these chips and move them into computing devices.”

Kayak, which is targeted at emerging markets, will use cloud-based applications, which will place Qualcomm on a collision course with traditional PC applications companies such as Microsoft.