LG 2010 smartphone plans: Tegra chips, 10 smartphones, 5 million units

LG’s smartphone-related plans are commencing to become so confusing that I suspect that LG themselves might be quite a lot confused.

What’s clear is that their mobile division has been losing money, and they have to change that asap. In doing so, a strong smartphone range is a must, since they’ve basically depended on featurephones for the past few quarters and that’s taken them nowhere with regards to profits.

Not some time past, we heard that they were planning on selling 6 million smartphones this year, 70% of those sales coming from Android-powered devices. But then they went and said that they expect Windows Phone 7 to outperform Android and it seemed they’d be banking on that.

And now they’re saying that they’ll sell 5 million smartphones, launch 10 new models, all by year’s end. What percentage of those will probably be Android-based, what percentage running Windows Phone 7 is unclear.

One thing is apparent, though. LG should start to truly do a little of the things it keeps announcing.

As for launching 10 smartphones by December, that’s entirely possible, but for the sales to move in addition as LG predict, they might better start releasing said handsets soon.

LG actually have a tablet planned, which we already knew, what we didn’t know is that it’ll apparently be “surprisingly productive”. Whatever meaning. It’s clearly an effort to tell apart from the iPad which everyone now regards as a ‘consumption-only’ device. How different LG’s tablet will probably be is still seen. Finally, more productive might just mean it’s going to have a video-conferencing camera.

Anyway, LG are also set to release a smartphone with a dual-core Nvidia Tegra CPU, on the way to join LG’s Optimus range. This can be big news, since the last phones that used Nvidia’s mobile processor were Microsoft’s failed Kin devices. Oh, the Zune HD also has Tegra, but an older version of it.

So it hasn’t been smooth sailing at involved in Nvidia in their mobile efforts, and getting LG on board may open the doors to other Qualcomm-enamoured manufacturers. And more competition is often good, so we’ll finally be capable of see how the Tegra performs against the Snapdragons and Hummingbirds of the sector.

Expect LG to keep announcing major milestones someday. Hopefully they’ll also deliver in some unspecified time in the future.

Via WSJ and Engadget