Priced at $1,699 for a 47-inch model and $2,299 for another measuring 55 vertical inches, LG’s so-called “G2 Series”  televisions were unveiled in January at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and represent the first products from the second generation of Google TV devices.

The 3D-capable TV will come with a Marvell dual-core chip set operating at 1.2GHz will allow users to blend PC-like Google experiences–such as searching the Web and watching video on YouTube and Google Play–with watching good old-fashioned live TV. For its nifty new sets, LG has also developed a Wii-like gesture-based remote controller that comes with a QWERTY keyboard.

New Google TV devices are also expected from Samsung, Vizio and Sony later this year, with Sony expected to expand the platform into Europe in September.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Google is hoping that Korea-headquartered LG, which is the second biggest manufacturer of TVs, can help kickstart its Google TV platform, which saw one of its two initial hardware partners, Logitech abandon the technology after disappointing early sales last year.

LG, meanwhile, is hoping that connected TVs based on the popular Android software architecture will boost TV sales.

In March, for example, research company IHS Screen Digest predicted the U.S. TV market would decline about 5 percent to 37.1 million new models sold in 2012.

Mario Queiroz, VP of product development for Google, appeared at last year’s paidContent Entertainment conference, where he spoke about Google TV and how it actually isn’t a cord-cutting product:

According to Q4 figures out from IDC, Apple is now the third-largest handset maker in the world, jumping two places from its number-five position in Q3. The reason for the rise, note the analysts, was not so much because it’s now selling cheaper, older iPhones — it is — but because of strong sales of its newest (and therefore premium-priced) iPhone 4S handset.

But it’s not just Apple that is a smartphone force, of course. The other three in the top-five rankings also make feature phones, but they are all also part of the huge push that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has made into smartphones via its Android platform. Having a feature phone and smartphone strategy is a double-threat to Nokia.

Apple’s rise still puts it at 8.7 market share — some 14 percent behind the Nokia and Samsung bracket — but it is an example of how a much the market has turned around in the last few years, that a handset maker can even be in spitting distance of the lead on the strength of a smartphone-only portfolio.

Apple saw astounding growth in Q4 and 2011 overall — 128 percent and 96 percent respectively. However, it will be worth watching whether that trend will continue in the quarters ahead amidst bigger economic factors:

IDC notes that the mobile phone market grew less in the last quarter than it has in the past two years, with vendors shipping 427.4 million units. “The mobile phone market exhibited unusually low growth last quarter, which shows it is not immune to weaker macroeconomic conditions worldwide,” writes analyst Ramon Llamas.

Ironically, that seemed to translate to a bigger-than-expected decline in cheaper feature phones than a slowdown in pricier smartphones. Despite that, IDC says that feature phone sales still accounted for the majority of handset sales in the last quarter.

Nokia — which actually saw sales of feature phones rise in the last quarter as it continued its decline in smartphones — seems catching only part of the wave that IDC describes. It is still holding on to the number-one slot, but given that its biggest driver right now is still feature phones, that leadership may well continue on its fast decline.

But if IDC’s forecast is a wave, then it is really Samsung that is the big Kahuna at the moment, with both strong feature phone and smartphone stories and reaching record levels of 90 million units overall for the quarter and more than 300 million for the year. IDC notes that fewer than 20 million units separated it from Nokia in the last quarter. Samsung earlier in 2011 already surpassed Nokia as the world’s biggest smartphone vendor, according to IDC figures.

Apple and Samsung are not the only ones benefiting from a strong smartphone offering in the top-five.

ZTE, which started to introduce smartphones into its portfolio last year and has huge ambitions in this space both on its own brand and partnering with carriers, took a big leap, the second-biggest after Apple for the year, in fact.

In contrast, LG (SEO: 066570), which has been somewhat rudderless in its smartphone strategy and equally less exciting in its feature phone offerings, saw very big declines, much bigger than Nokia’s: over 24 percent over the year compared to Nokia’s eight percent.

With ZTE just behind LG at the moment, it looks like those two might be swapping places in the quarters ahead if LG doesn’t manage to turn things around. So which should it concentrate on fixing first: smartphones or feature devices?

Predictably, the company’s stock rose on the news by some five percent when the report emerged yesterday, originally at the Fox Business site. RIM’s stock has declined in value by some 75 percent in the last year, as its share of worldwide sales of smartphones has declined. The latest figures from Gartner, covering Q3, 2011, note that RIM’s BlackBerry platform had an 11 percent share of smartphone sales, down from 15.4 percent of smartphone sales in the same quarter a year ago.

The Fox (NSDQ: NWS) report says that Goldman will be exploring “strategic options” for the company. If it is true, it could mean RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) merging with another company; or it could mean a sale of parts. One investor, Jaguar Financial, has advocated RIM selling its handset business, and its many valuable patents, and then focusing on services — although it is questionable whether those mobile services like email and BBM have enough steam in them to run on their own without the direct link to the devices designed for them. That would also be a massive step away from the “vertical” company model, used by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), that so many hold up as essential for success today.

Perhaps more significantly than the 4.4 percent decline in smartphone market share that RIM has faced is the fact that many investors, and a sizable-enough swathe of the general public, have largely seemed to lose confidence in the company after a disastrous year.

Problems included a less-than-spectacular entry into the tablet market with the PlayBook; legal hiccups surrounding the launch of the next OS for its phones BlackBerry 10; and a major international service outage that knocked out email, BlackBerry Messenger, Internet and other data services for thousands of its customers.

The role that BBM played in helping enable communications between rioters last year in London was not the company’s fault, but it didn’t exactly heap good PR on the company, either.

On top of all that, there are many lingering questions over whether the company’s longtime management structure, with co-CEOs, is really the best way to move ahead in the current market climate, faced as RIM is with competition from all sides: on platforms in the form of iOS, Android and potentially Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7; and in devices again from Apple, plus the many licensees making devices using those other operating systems. RIM is now apparently changing how it runs things, but perhaps not soon and drastically enough.

As for would-be buyers for RIM, names that have been floated include the usual suspects among large companies that might be on the hunt for a bolt-on acquisition that would give it instant scale in mobile: among them, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), presumably to beef up their mobile push and for the enterprise services part; and a joint bid from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK), which would probably be more for the mobile enterprise customer base, and a complement to the handsets Nokia makes already.

And while we’re throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, what about LG, or Dell?

“We are proud of the continued success of our program in resolving the IP issues surrounding Android and Chrome OS,” said Microsoft’s Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for its intellectual property group, in a press release. Of course, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is the one forcing those issues by threatening to sue anyone using Android who doesn’t sign a license to its patent portfolio, but most Android partners have taken a look at their cards and folded: only Motorola (NYSE: MMI) and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) have chosen to fight.

LG (SEO: 066570) is hardly an Android powerhouse in the U.S., trailing HTC, Samsung, and Motorola, but it is featured prominently on the shelves of several wireless carriers. Unless sales of Nokia’s new Windows Phones really take off in 2012, Microsoft is poised to enjoy another year in which it makes more money from mobile patent licensing than it does mobile products: 70 percent of Android phones sold in the U.S. are now covered by patent-licensing deals, Microsoft said.

Figures for Q3 from Gartner note that LG is still the world’s third-biggest phone maker overall, which includes not just smartphones but also lower-end feature phone devices. But its share is in decline. In the quarter it sold 4.8 percent of all mobile handsets worldwide, compared to 6.6 percent for the same quarter a year before. That means Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), which grew its market share to 3.9 percent from 3.2 percent in the same period, is inching up closer. And since Apple is doing that with a higher-priced, smartphone-only lineup, it’s likely making far better returns on those sales than LG.

In smartphones, LG is doing better than some of the many Android-based makers out there, but it’s also doing worse than others. LG’s name doesn’t make Strategy Analytics’ list for the top vendors in that same quarter, falling instead into “others” (the top three, they say, are Samsung, Apple, and Nokia (NYSE: NOK), in that order).

In smartphone figures that analysts NPD released directly to journalists (so no link) earlier this week, it said that only one LG device, the LG Revere, made the top-10 sales rankings for October and November. It was at number-10, while Apple took the top-three slots and Samsung the next two.

LG has seen a few high-profile management changes in its mobile division, and has raised some $1 billion in the markets, to try to turn things around, while at the same time showing commitment to the business. And it is also going for another route to change: a partnership.

And it is looking high and low for Mr Right: “We’re looking into almost every alliance that the mobile industry can think of,” the chief executive of LG’s mobile business, Park Jong-seok, told Reuters. He further said that some of those talks are “quite active.”

Partnerships in the mobile industry are certainly nothing new.

Some, like the now-concluding alliance between Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC), demonstrate how hard it can be to make them work. Others, like Nokia and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), or Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Motorola (NYSE: MMI) (if regulators approve it, and neither side backs out), still need to play out before we can say whether they were a wrong move or not. One thing for sure is that one company that was integrated from the word go, Apple, is doing something very right, and others are trying to follow in its mold.

That kind of vertical integration could give us a clue as to what kind of company LG has in mind when Park says “alliance” — but with all other eligible platforms otherwise engaged, it makes LG’s position a little more challenging.

As with other companies, like Dell, which are looking to renew their attack on the mobile market, another area that LG will need to consider is content, and the ecosystem that will exist on their devices. With many of the world’s big media brands very far from the vertical integration question where mobile is concerned, but still harboring ideas of what they could do if they had it (think Facebook here), that could be more fertile ground. Life may be Good for LG, but it can definitely be so much better.

New research from NPD In-Stat — covering how hardware form factors determine device usage — concluded that there are optimal uses for certain screen sizes. Larger screens, it found, were better for “productive” needs. Smaller screens were better for communication and entertainment.

The majority of tablets that have sold have screen sizes between nine and eleven inches, said In-Stat. The most common uses for them at the moment are web browsing, email, and app usage — which In-Stat categorizes as productivity. In-Stat said that smaller screens more more likely used for entertainment such as video or music consumption. That’s not to say that the bigger devices were not used for these purposes, but since In-Stat was also evaluating ownership of portable media players, smartphones and other mobile devices, the results may have been skewed. One way that results did not skew, however, was to find that smaller screens were better for productivity than larger ones.

The research is based on responses from 652 “technology users and decision makers”, which isn’t exactly a comprehensive number,

But these conclusions, if they are accurate, could serve to highlight and partly (but not completely) explain why some tablets have not done so well on the market. Three examples in particular, the Streak five- and seven-inch-screened models from Dell, and the seven-inch-screened PlayBook from BlackBerry, were theoretically aimed at least in part at the enterprise market — core customer bases for the two brands. But according to In-Stat’s conclusions that plan would have never worked: those tablets are just too small for productivity uses (or at least what people expect to use for productivity purposes at the moment).

There have been a lot of different estimates for what kind of market share the 9.7-inch-screen iPad from Apple has at the moment but even one of the more conservative still gives it a majority of the market through the end of this year.

T. Michael Walkley, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity, estimates that Apple started out 2011 with more than 80 percent of the tablet market worldwide but the last year has taken that down to just over 63 percent. Competition from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Samsung, Asus, HTC, LG (SEO: 066570) and even Nokia (NYSE: NOK), he predicts, will impact Apple’s share once again, although Apple will still have 52.4 percent of the market at the end of this year.

Nokia: An early candidate for the most prominent phone introduced at CES, Nokia’s Lumia 900 represents its best attempt to date at cracking the U.S. market. Some key details have still not been released, but this sleek LTE phone running Windows Phone 7 will probably turn a few heads.

HTC: The struggling Android vendor introduced the Titan II, a Windows Phone device for AT&T’s LTE network that also comes with a 16-megapixel camera.

Motorola: Verizon will carry the Droid 4, another LTE phone with a hardware keyboard which was surprisingly launched with the Gingerbread flavor of Android, although the partners promised to upgrade it to Android 4.0. Motorola (NYSE: MMI) also introduced the Razr Maxx, which is a much bigger version of the Razr smartphone that appears to have a much larger battery.

Samsung: As leaked last week, Sprint (NYSE: S) will carry the Galaxy Nexus as one of its first LTE phones later this year. Samsung’s Galaxy Note will arrive in the U.S. this year, when we’ll find out if people really want a device that’s not quite a smartphone and not quite a tablet. And Samsung remains committed to the Galaxy Tab, launching a 7.7-inch version of the Android tablet for Verizon’s LTE network.

LG: Sprint also plans to carry the LG (SEO: 066570) Viper, an “eco-friendly” phone which is apparently “eco-friendly” because it uses an extremely efficient charger and is made from 35 percent recycled plastics.

Huawei: It launched what the company called “the thinnest smartphone.” It’s an Android 4.0 device that measures just under 7 millimeters thick.

Pantech: Pantech’s Burst is an Android phone for the budget-conscious, it will launch on AT&T’s network for under $50 with a contract.

Apple: There were no iPhones announced at CES (there never have been and likely never will be) but Monday’s phone frenzy coincided with the five-year anniversary of the Macworld presentation where Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. That milestone was on many people’s minds during the show and has had as much to do with the shift toward mobile computing so evident in Las Vegas as anything unveiled at CES over the same period of time.

A new survey from ChangeWave Research, polling some 4,000 consumers in the region, paints an interesting picture for how the smartphone market might play out in the next couple of months.

It found that 54 percent of those planning to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days said that they were planning to buy an iPhone. That number is actually down by 11 percent since the last survey taken in September, but still gives the company a massive lead over the next most-popular smartphone brand, Samsung.

ChangeWave also notes that this represents a huge lead especially considering that the company’s last new phone model, the iPhone 4S, came out some two months ago. Overall, Apple has taken a very minimalistic approach to smartphone rollouts compared to companies like HTC, Samsung, and the others, which have dozens of smartphone handset models between them, compared to the three from Apple.

Korea-based Samsung — which last week posted results that showed that at the moment it is the Android handset maker to beat — polled as the most-wanted brand by 13 percent of consumers.

That’s well behind Apple, but still represents a rise of eight percent, the biggest gain of any brand. ChangeWave speculates that the recent launch of the 4G Galaxy Nexus, with the latest version of Android, could have been behind some of that bigger-than-average rise.

Another Android maker, Motorola, at seven percent, posted a slight increase of two percent over the last-polled period — a contrast to the sales decline Motorola expects to report for the quarter just ended. Motorola is currently getting acquired by Google (NSDQ: GOOG) for $12.5 billion.

HTC and RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), meanwhile, rounded out the brands and both declined. This is not much of a surprise: HTC has had a mixed set of results over the last couple of quarters (with more recent numbers being declines) and recently downgraded its forecasts. RIM, too, has been seeing declines in sales and much else: ChangeWave notes that since peaking in September 2008, RIM has declined in eight of the last 12 quarterly surveys conducted by the researchers.

Current customer satisfaction. What’s driving the customer buying intentions? One big area, contends ChangeWave, is existing customer satisfaction, with largely mirror buying intentions — with three notable exceptions.

As with buying intent, Apple continues to top the polls for customer satisfaction, with the most recent numbers indicating that 75 percent of current iPhone owners consider themselves “very satisfied.”

Then it gets somewhat confusing: Android makers Samsung and HTC tie with a 47 percent rating, while Motorola comes in fourth at 45 percent. LG (SEO: 066570) and Nokia don’t make the top-five buying intentions but they still score higher than RIM in terms of keeping customers happy. In other words, brands like HTC, LG and Nokia are keeping their current owners happy enough, but they are not able to convey that very well to the marketplace at the moment.

Separately to this, we’ve received some other survey results from Mobile Posse, a homescreen messaging and marketing company, on a survey they’ve been conducting with new handset owners in the U.S. — a rolling list of around 100,000, which gets polled monthly.

These results don’t compare different brands or models to each other, per se, but they do take stock of how satisfied a current owner is with his or her new handset. This is done through a pop-up screen on the device itself, and is done in cooperation with the handset makers, who agree to allow the messaging on their devices. The messages come up within 48 hours of the phones being activated and cover some 100 models from 10 handset makers including HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola, Pantech, RIM, Samsung, Casio and PCD.

Mobile Posse found that, in contrast to ChangeWave’s overall brand satisfaction rankings, the two devices that ranked the highest in its survey were, surprisingly, some older models: the HTC Hero (mean score: 4.3) and the Motorola Electrify (mean score: 4.4). The lowest scoring models averaged mean scores of 3.8, although Mobile Posse does not specify which device this was.

There are a couple of big caveats to this data. For starters, Apple is not on the list so you are unable to have a comparative score for how its devices compare; ditto companies like Nokia (NYSE: NOK). Similarly, it’s not clear which models, exactly, are included in the poll, so again its difficult to know if the Motorola Electrify or the HTC Hero actually scored better than, say, a Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

One end note: Mobile Posse’s research also threw a bit of light onto the usefulness of buying intent information — or not, as the case may be.

It found that 43 percent of those being polled were decided buyers — meaning that they knew exactly what they wanted to buy before they bought it. But almost just as many — 34 percent — were undetermined. Combining that with 11 percent saying they were “converted” to a particular device at the point of sale, that means there is still a lot to play for between buying intent and actually forking out the dough. (And it also explains why Apple’s singular retail strategy is so clever: give users no other options to change to except for their own models.)

–Android Tablets, Take 3: A year after several Android tablets which appeared to be strong contenders against Apple’s iPad were introduced at CES, expect the hype to be much more subdued following the dismal year suffered by Android tablet makers. Several companies will likely showcase tablets based on Google’s Android 4.0 software, which unifies the smartphone and tablet versions in one operating system. But it’s the success of other takes on Android, such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire, that will have the mobile folks wondering how committed Android tablet makers are to Google’s vision.

–WinNok: Nokia hasn’t had much success selling its wares in the U.S., but it will likely make a splash next week with new Windows Phone 7 phones designed for U.S. networks, such as AT&T (NYSE: T). T-Mobile’s version of the Lumia 710 will start shipping on Wednesday, and Bloomberg reported Friday that it will introduce a version for AT&T’s 4G LTE network at the show.

Despite app fatigue, there’s a sense that the mobile market can accommodate a third mobile operating system that would replace the declining BlackBerry brand. Microsoft and Nokia are perhaps best positioned to do so, but will have to generate demand beyond bribing carrier sales people to recommend Windows Phone 7 handsets.

–Internet In The TV: Heard this one before? Google (NSDQ: GOOG) TV hasn’t exactly made a splash, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) continues to slow-play its television hand, and a host of other companies haven’t really succeeded in marrying Internet content to the television. However, this is going to happen one of the these days, and so expect to hear a whole new round of reasons why Vendor X’s approach to this market will win.

With so much money invested to this point, the TV industry also can’t ignore an opportunity to promote 3D television. Toshiba will introduce a 3D television that doesn’t require glasses, according to CNET, although if it’s as expensive as versions that sell in Europe and Asia, don’t hold your breath.

–Ultrabook: NetBook 2.0: The venerable PC industry would love to steal back some of the thunder from Apple and the mobile companies, and led by Grandpa Intel (NSDQ: INTC) they’ll be promoting Ultrabooks left and right during the show. They’ll conveniently ignore that the Ultrabook is basically just a Windows take on the MacBook Air and promote the virtues of mobility.

All jokes aside, this is a smart idea: make affordable notebook-style PCs that have more horsepower than netbook without weighing as much as much as traditional notebooks. People are enamored with smartphones and tablets but only a brave few have taken the talk of “post-PC era” literally enough to ditch their personal computers, and Windows 8 seems like it will take more than a few cues from mobile design principles focused on simplicity.

–End of an era?: CES has come to represent the best and worst of the tech industry in the years since the demise of Comdex and the rise of the “consumerization of IT,” a shift where consumers, not executives in Fortune 500 tech departments, became the people who drove industry trends. It brings an industry together for the types of invaluable personal meetings that are harder and harder to schedule each year, but is usually long on style and short on substance: Samsung used an extremely valuable evening keynote slot last year to put on some sort of weird furry convention, and the celebrity list this year includes Justin Bieber and Snooki.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will deliver his company’s last CES keynote show this year, ending a years-long tradition in which Microsoft has kicked off the festivities. CES is simply too big at the moment to go downhill all that quickly, but the 2012 edition could be a high-water mark.

Not brilliant news for Motorola Mobility and its would-be buyer, Google: the handset maker today issued preliminary Q4 results that will fall short of market expectations, citing competition from other handset makers and costs related to patent litigation.

Motorola today said in a statement that it expects to post sales of $3.4 million billion with only “modest” profitability (the exact amount, slightly worryingly, was not specified). It estimates shipments of 10.5 million mobile devices, with 5.3 million of those smartphones. Its Home business, covering digital media technology, should bring in $900 million.

According to poll of analysts by Reuters, Moto was expected to report $3.88 million billion in revenues. The shipment numbers will be down on the 11.3 million posted for Q3, although smartphones are up compared to the 4.8 million reported for in that period.

In its release Motorola cites the “increased competitive environment” for some of the shortfall, and to be sure companies like Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) and Samsung are really killing it right now in smartphones, both in market share and, significantly, mindshare.

But turning this around, you could also argue that Moto has failed to deliver compelling enough handsets of its own. These have included the Droid Razr, the company’s first smartphone riff on its once-bestselling Razr line, a new version of its Atrix 4G device, the extended rollout of its Defy device. Motorola doesn’t specify any more on its IP litigation but it is fighting suits against Apple and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), among others, not just in the U.S. but in Europe as well.

Motorola, which makes smartphones based on Google’s Android platform, is not the only Android maker reporting bad news today. HTC also today said its profits declined in the face of ongoing competition in the smartphone market. Given that Sony (NYSE: SNE) Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) (soon to be only Sony) and LG (SEO: 066570), two other major Android device makers, have also had some trouble in their device businesses, it seems that the only Android partner really winning right now is Samsung, which today also reported quarterly results with a growth in revenues and profits.

While this is not great news for Motorola, it is also potentially a bother for another major company: Google (NSDQ: GOOG), which is currently in the process of buying Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. If the phone business is proving a challenge, and the Moto patents that Google sorely needs are costing a fortune to defend, then where, exactly, will the value be in the deal?

We may get some more color on this news next week during CES, where Motorola Mobility will have a strong presence. The company will be releasing its full Q4 earnings on January 26.