Nvidia is trying to get a foothold in the mobile business with its Tegra chipset, and LG will be the Trojan horse

What are the third largest manufacturer of cell phones and an underdog in the mobile chipset business to do, so they can both stand out from the crowd? Well, make something contemporary together, of course. That's especially if you are 3rd largest mainly due to the constant churn of feature phones, or if you have been trying hard to spark interest in someone in your system-on-a-chip (SoC) for smartphones and tablets. LG announced that it will have Nvidia's Tegra 2 chipset powering its high-end spectrum of the Optimus line.

The LG Optimus GT540  we reviewed some months ago was a decent Android smartphone, but nowhere near high-end. LG, however, is planning no less than 10 other smart touchscreen devices in the line by year's end, and one of those will be an Android-running Optimus tablet. For the tablet, LG said yesterday that it will be focusing on productivity like multimedia and document editing, even coding, rather than only on content consumption.

As for the phones, five of them will apparently be running Windows Phone 7, which leaves four for Android, if we count the tablet. Two of those we already heard will be called Optimus One and Chic, and another one should be a Snapdragon-powered Optimus Q with a slide-out keyboard. So this kind of leaves a total of one unannounced high-end handset to be powered by the Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset, if we don't count the tablet, which will almost certainly be Tegra-based, since Nvidia already demoed a tablet with the SoC.

Looks like our predictions that Nvidia is the best positioned underdog to enter the smartphone chipset battle, and fight with the dual-core Snapdragon and OMAP4 or Hummingbird, is holding water for now. No wonder – the Tegra 2 chipset has a dual-core CPU based on the latest Cortex-A9 ARM architecture and, of course, the powerful GPU should come standard considering who is behind Tegra 2. The only concern with the SoC on last read was battery life not up to par with the dual-core Snapdragons and TI's OMAP4, but that remains to be confirmed in real life. The Tegra 2 chipset has its potential also recognized by Motorola, which will be having its own tablet with the platform by the end of the year running Gingerbread, so exciting tablety times ahead.

source: WSJ via Engadget