LG To Debut Second Intel-Powered Smartphone At CES 2012

“If at first you don’t succeed, try try again.” It looks like LG and Intel have taken that old adage to heart, if a new report is to be believed. The Korea Times reports that LG will debut an Intel-powered smartphone at CES 2012, but the bigger question is whether or not the device will ever make it to market.

LG and Intel’s first mobile partnership yielded an Android smartphone running on Intel’s Moorestown chipset for CES 2011, but the device was ultimately scrapped. The reason for its premature demise? As the story goes, the device died because of it’s “lack of marketability.”

LG’s brass certainly thinks their Intel smartphone is viable — according to one of the Times’ executive sources, the device could be released as soon this March. Still, the original LG-Intel phone was pegged with a 2011 release date, so take those claims with a grain of salt for bow.

Hopefully LG’s second swing at an Intel-powered phone fares a little better — it’s said to run on Intel’s next-generation Medfield system-on-a-chip, and early tests have yielded some pretty impressive benchmarks when compared to NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon MSM8260 SoCs.

Of course, the real competition is yet to come, as nearly every player in the mobile chipset market is hard at work on their next-generation platforms. Intel has a lot of brand recognition when it comes to PCs, but their lack of presence in the mobile market to date could mean that Medfield could drown in a sea of established ARM-based chipsets.

That’s why the partnership with LG is so critical — despite their handset division spending a few quarters in the red, LG is still the number two handset OEM in the U.S. Having a major hardware vendor taking a chance on their new platform could establish Intel as a real player in the mobile space, and right now Intel’s mobile efforts could use all the visibility they can get.

Windows Phone 7 will get three LTE phones in 2012

Yesterday we saw an alleged leak of Microsoft’s 2012 Windows Phone roadmap. It offers an eyebrow-raising view of a company that is trying to invade the smartphone market from the bottom up (starting with low-end phones). Today we have a new report that further materializes Microsoft’s near-term plans for Windows Phone 7.

The big news, which will apparently be officially announced at CES, is that there will be several LTE Windows Phone devices in 2012 — and they will all be on AT&T. The three phones — the Nokia ACE, HTC Radiant, and Samsung Mendel — will ship by the middle of the year. The ACE, specifically, is set to launch on March 18.

The LTE phones will probably all run Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, as the previous roadmap leak points to the Tango update, which is aimed towards low-end phones, coming earlier in the year. The Apollo update, which will support high-end handsets, won’t show until the fourth quarter of 2012.

A final detail of the new leak has Nokia’s Lumia 710 launching on T-Mobile on January 11, and on Verizon in April. The Lumia 710 will launch in the US before the Lumia 800, making Americans’ first impressions of the Nokia/Microsoft alliance that of a mid-range phone that doesn’t dazzle like the Lumia 800.

While the Microsoft/Nokia bottom-up strategy seems illogical, it could have something to do with the release of Windows 8. Though Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7 are two different operating systems, the Metro UI will bring them together on a cosmetic level. In the eyes of most customers, that may be enough to create a positive association and let Windows Phone ride Windows 8′s (expected) buzz. The strategy could fizzle, but it also may be a smart gamble.

* Note that the above image is a visualization: no Windows Phone marketing materials were part of the leak.