When you come to a new place and want to make a good impression, it never hurts to bring a goodie or two along. Paul Jacobs learned that lesson somewhere.

At the end of the Qualcomm chief executive’s first Consumer Electronics Show keynote, audience members learned that 300 of them would be walking away with a coupon to get a mobile gadget that plays live television from the company’s FLO TV service. The good news was delivered by sports announcer James Brown, who told audience members to look under their seats to find the coupons. Lively applause followed from the lucky winners.

Neither the giveaway nor the reaction were too surprising. Attendees clearly got some value. The device — priced at $250 when it was announced last fall — is being given to them with six months of free service, Brown said.

Qualcomm also has reason to take unusual marketing steps. The company has admitted the service has grown slowly among U.S. users, at least compared to the rapid adoption of mobile TV in countries such as South Korea. Jacobs said another step Qualcomm will take this year is to add more programming to target sports fans (that’s why Brown was on stage — he pronounced it a “must-have” item for real sports fanatics).

If FLO is struggling a bit, other parts of Qualcomm’s business are rocking — at least to judge by the procession of partners that showed new developments based on the company’s chips and other techologies.

For instance, Todd Bradley, an executive vice president at Hewlett-Packard, showed a prototype of a potential “smartbook” that uses Qualcomm chips based on ARM Holdings technology. The potential customer win was announced Wednesday night, but the on-stage demo made a few things clearer about the potential of the product. For one thing, it uses Android software and a touch screen, allowing users to flip through photos in the fluid manner of an iPhone user.

Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing showed its own much-discussed smartbook and another Qualcomm-powered product that is likely to have an even bigger impact on its business: the computer maker’s first smart phone. His on-stage appearance was preceded by HTC CEO Peter Chou, who showed a new phone design it calls HTC Smart. Not only does it use Qualcomm’s chips but also the company’s Brew software platform, despite all the recent focus on Android and apps for that Google operating system.

Jacobs’ speech went on for well over an hour and touched on many topics, and he threw out many facts and stats about how far mobile technology has come. For example, he said that cellphones have now exceeded the reach of TVs, standard wired telephones and just about everything else.

“The cellphone has become the most widespread platform that human beings have ever created,” Jacobs said.

Perhaps the greatest crowd pleaser among Jacobs’ guests — after Brown and the free TV players, at least — was Eric Topol, a cardiologist and genomics professor who has become a kind of Pied Piper for the use of wireless devices in medicine. Topol, who among other things is chief medical officer of the West Wireless Health Institute, showed a series of applications on handheld gadgets that showed his vital signs, ultrasound images of his body and a remote patient, and the vital signs of a patient in an intensive care unit in Texas.

“Consumers have been concerned about the economic crisis” in medicine, Topol said. “But we can innovate out of that.”

Now that’s the kind of optimism people come to CES to hear.

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