Daily Video: LG Unveiling 4 Midrange Smartphones at MWC

LG will debut four new midrange smartphones at Mobile World Congress 2015 which convenes in Barcelona, Spain March 2.

The four Android smartphones, which the company says include design and technical features normally found in more expensive handsets, were announced by LG on Feb. 23.

Prices for the new devices—the Magna, the Spirit, the Leon and the Joy—have not yet been announced, but the company said they will be priced in the midrange of the mobile handset marketplace. A global rollout of the new phones started the week of Feb. 23 in select markets.

EZchip Semiconductor is planning to put 100 ARM-based 64-bit cores into a processor aimed at a rapidly evolving networking market by leveraging the technology it inherited when it bought Tilera last fall.

EZchip officials will give details about the upcoming Tile-Mx chips Feb. 25 at the Linley Data Center Conference in San Jose, Calif.

The multi-core processors were first discussed earlier in the month during a conference call to talk about the company’s latest quarterly numbers. The chips are in development, but EZchip won’t release samples until the second half of 2016.

A federal judge in California has thrown out an antitrust lawsuit that accused Google of indirectly driving up smartphone prices and stifling innovation through anticompetitive behavior.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California charged Google with forcing Android smartphone manufacturers to make Google’s search engine and applications the default option on their handsets.

Google has acquired technology and intellectual property from Softcard, a mobile payments venture established in 2010 by Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile USA.

This is likely in response to Apple’s roll out of the Apple Pay service in recent months. Softcard’s near-field communication payment technology will power future versions of Google’s Wallet app for mobile payments, the two companies said.

Under the technology acquisition arrangement, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile will preinstall Wallet on smartphones running Android 4.4 or later versions starting later this year.