When in San Diego recently, BoomTown paid a visit to Qualcomm and its Chairman and CEO, Paul Jacobs, to talk about a new “smartbook” device the wireless-technology company unveiled last week, but that won’t make its debut until the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in January.

There, Jacobs will show off what is essentially a combination of a smartphone and a netbook.

Obviously, it’s going to be a competitive market and, really, Apple, with its upcoming tablet computer, is also pushing into this mobile-phone-that-ate-computers space.

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Way back in the fall of 2001, BoomTown attended a keynote speech at the now-defunct Comdex show in Las Vegas, where Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates continued to bang the drum for one of his long-running obsessions: The tablet computer.

It is an obsession he has never given up.

So it is ironic that all the hype has suddenly and firmly coalesced around the particulars of the tablet that Apple has developed–a device being spearheaded by CEO Steve Jobs and likely to arrive in the coming months.

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While in Southern California last week, BoomTown sat down with Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs to have a chat about the booming market for smart phones and, well, smart everything.

With all the swirl around iPhones from Apple, the Palm Pre, the various new BlackBerrys from Research in Motion and whatever else gets cooked up by Amazon, Google and others in the critical smart and mobile device market, it’s interesting to hear what Jacobs has to say–especially since his company is going to be one of the ones to benefit from such an explosion.

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It did not start out too well for AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong, with a poll on the screen showing most of the attendees in the ballroom at Fortune Brainstorm Tech voting that the Time Warner online unit was either out of juice or irrelevant.

Armstrong did not break any news in the interview with Fortune’s lively interviewer, David Kirkpatrick, relying more on projecting an I’m-in-charge-here attitude and saying confident things like “a challenge is also an opportunity.”

In general, Armstrong tried to be upbeat about the prospects for AOL, which has for too long been the Web’s sad sack of an Internet company.

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Siri is a virtual personal assistant for your Apple iPhone or computer, originated at the Stanford Research Institute and spun out as an artificial intelligence project financed by DARPA.

In its demo for Walt Mossberg and me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Siri tried to show how it was an alternative to search.

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Yesterday, in a BoomTown post about the latest unproven rumors that the world’s most iconic computer company, Apple, was in “late-stage” negotiations to buy Silicon Valley’s latest pretty young thing, microblogging service Twitter, I wrote:

“Oh, the very notion of Apple and Twitter is a Techmeme dream-ticket, sure to be chewed over for days on end. (I once considered doing a post that just said “AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter…” for 1,000 words to see how much idiotic traffic I would get.)”

Well, I reconsidered.

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In early discussions that began in the last several weeks that apparently included a face-to-face meeting last week, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer are finally talking about search and also advertising partnerships the companies could possibly strike, said several sources with knowledge of the situation.

According to a variety of sources, the talks between the pair and other execs at both companies are preliminary and wide-ranging, focused on what kind of commercial relationship Yahoo and Microsoft could have in the future.

But, cautioned sources close to Yahoo, the discussions are not about a renewed acquisition attempt by Microsoft and also might not result in any deal.

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Displaying BoomTown’s advanced age and elephantine cache of meaningless tech memories, after news yesterday that the software giant was plunging into the retail market, I was surprised to find little mention that Microsoft’s last store effort had ended in failure in 2001.

That’s not to say it’s a particularly good or bad idea to hire a former Dreamworks and Wal-Mart exec named David Porter as vice president of retail stores to create Microsoft-branded stores–or as the company announced yesterday, “to create a better PC and Microsoft retail purchase experience.”

Just as long as the Zunes go on the back shelf!

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Hey, did you hear that Apple is launching some sort of new notebook thingamabob today?

If you didn’t, it can’t be because the Apple-product-release-hyper-hype cycle let you down.

AllThingsD.com’s Johnny Apple-blogger John Paczkowski of Digital Daily will be there, of course, posting at the media-clogged launch, as it happens, and contributing mightily to the blog-smog that will start collecting over Cupertino at 10 a.m. PDT.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

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When he debuted his company’s new DVD copier at DEMOfall recently, called RealDVD, RealNetworks’ Rob Glaser did a video interview with BoomTown about it.

And now that RealNetworks and Hollywood are cross-suing each other over RealDVD–in the latest clash over the still-contentious copyright issue that separates the tech and entertainment industries–it’s time for a replay!

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A man hiking in a remote part of Mammoth Lakes in California’s Sierra Nevada found a pilot’s license and an FAA card, both bearing the name of aviator Steve Fossett.

The discovery is about 50 miles away from Nevada desert locations where teams had been searching for the well-known adventurer, who vanished while on a solo flight in a single-engine Bellanca Super Decathlon a year ago.

After Fossett’s disappearance, tens of thousands of Web users mounted an unusual online search mission, called “crowdsourcing,” studying satellite photos of a huge swath of ground.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview that Walt Mossberg did with Michael Dell, the founder of the once-high-flying computer company who has returned as its CEO. Dell was forced to resume the role in 2007 after changing market conditions caused the company to falter and competition from Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Sony increased.

This is part three of three parts.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s an interview that Walt Mossberg did with Michael Dell, the founder of the once-high-flying computer company who has returned as its CEO. Dell was forced to resume the role in 2007, after changing market conditions caused the company to falter and competition from Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Sony increased.

This is part two of three parts.

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As usual before yet another big Apple event, the psychic friends network is in overdrive in anticipation of the iconic computer company’s “Let’s Rock” media gathering in San Francisco tomorrow.

At this point, I think Apple could announce a change in the color of its bathrooms at its Cupertino HQ and it would be mayhem among the Mac faithful.

But some of the focus is likely to be on its leader, Steve Jobs, whose gaunt appearance was the talk of Apple’s last event.

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With all the holiday hubbub, don’t miss this great piece in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend by Steve Stecklow and James Bandler, which chronicles the bumpy road of the much-hyped $100 laptop project, spearheaded by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte.

Walt Mossberg and I have had Negroponte at two of our D conferences to talk about [...]

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