From InfoWorld: Chip giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) reported its best quarterly net profit and sales ever in the second quarter, and predicted the third quarter will be even better.

The company's strong performance highlights the speed at which the chip industry is recovering from the lows reached last year as the global recession took hold. It also follows stellar results from other chip giants. Intel, the world's biggest chip maker, also reported a record-breaking second quarter as revenue, gross margin, operating profit, and earnings per share all hit new highs.

TSMC is considered a technology industry bellwether for its size and the range of devices for which it makes chips. TSMC is the world's largest contract chip maker, manufacturing chips for global companies such as Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Nvidia.

TSMC's net profit reached NT$40.28 billion (US$1.25 billion), up 65 percent over the same period last year and beating its former record of NT$34.49 billion from the fourth quarter of 2007. TSMC's sales rose 41 percent to NT$105.0 billion, another record. Its old sales record was NT$93.86 billion, also from the fourth quarter of 2007.

Demand for TSMC's chip manufacturing services was brisk globally, but also picked up in some new areas, including Japan. That country has been slow to outsource chip manufacturing to companies such as TSMC, but appears to have recently started to move in that direction.

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From PC World: LG Electronics plans to launch its first tablet device in the fourth quarter, running Google's Android mobile software, it said Thursday.

The company had already said it would debut the product this year, but had not said when. The fourth quarter doesn't narrow the time-frame by much, but it does say the device won't be ready in the next few months.

The company said its tablet will be part of its Optimus Series of smartphones and tablet devices. LG, one of South Korea's largest electronics makers, has already unveiled three Optimus smartphones, including the Optimus Z, which uses Android version 2.1 and a 1GHz Qualcomm SnapDragon chipset. The Optimus Z hit the South Korean market on Thursday, the company said.

A number of electronics companies have shown off or announced tablet devices they intend to launch this year to compete with Apple's popular iPad.

A few of the tablet devices shown off at the Computex Taipei electronics show in June used Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system, while others had Android installed.

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From CNET News.com: Motorola turned in a solid second quarter, with both revenue and earnings outpacing analysts' expectations.

The company also said it foresees good results for the current quarter, in part on the expected strength of sales of its new Droid X smartphone, which went on sale in mid-July and quickly sold out at many stores.

"The Droid X launch has been very well received," said Sanjay Jha, Motorola co-chief executive officer and CEO of Motorola Mobility, in a statement. "As we continue to execute on our business strategy, we are in a strong position to continue improving our share in the rapidly growing smartphone market and improving our operating performance."

For the second quarter, which ended July 3, Motorola reported revenue of $5.414 billion. That's down slightly from the $5.497 billion the company took in during the same period a year ago, but it was good enough to beat analysts' estimates, which averaged $5.19 billion.

Second-quarter earnings, setting aside certain costs, were 9 cents per share, one penny ahead of expectations and up from 3 cents per share for the year-ago quarter.

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From CNET News.com: Verizon Wireless smartphone customers use 25 percent more data than AT&T iPhone customers, thanks in large part to new Verizon's new Android smartphones, a recent study indicates.

Validas, a company that analyzes cell phone bills and usage for consumers and corporate customers, analyzed 20,000 consumer phone bills between January and May of 2010 and discovered that Verizon Wireless smartphone customers consume on average about 421 megabytes per month. Meanwhile, AT&T iPhone users consume roughly 25 percent less data, or about 338 megabytes per month.

The full Validas report will be published on September 1.

The comparison between smartphone data usage on Verizon's network and iPhone data usage on AT&T's network is important to note, because iPhone users have typically been viewed as the heaviest data users in the entire mobile market. The fact that Verizon is seeing a major uptick in data usage in the past six months, largely due to new Android smartphones, could be a key predictor of wireless data usage patterns going forward. If the trends continue, Verizon could see an explosion in data usage.

So far, Verizon's network hasn't faced any major hiccups due to the onslaught of new data traffic. This is in contrast to AT&T's network, which, over the past three years since the iPhone was launched, has been criticized for dropping calls and offering slower than expected data download speedson their iPhones in some parts of the country.

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From DailyTech: Remember Yahoo and Google's short-lived advertising deal, which came about shortly after Microsoft's failed purchase attempt of the company? Just when it seemed Microsoft and Yahoo were merged at the hip and going to ride off into the sunset together holding hands, along comes Google again looking to play the home-wrecker.

Google has scored a deal with Yahoo Japan to become the exclusive engine provider for the company's search. Information from Yahoo's portal will be funneled directly to Google's network of sites, and the pair will cooperate closely on many efforts.

The deal is very significant as Yahoo Japan is the most used search engine in Japan. It is perhaps inaccurate to call Yahoo Japan a part of Yahoo (U.S.). The American search engine company owns one third of the Japanese firm. It indicated that it would support its Japanese property, despite the fact that it picked Google's search engine over Bing -- Microsoft's search engine that power Yahoo's U.S. search portal.

Microsoft, though, is infuriated that Yahoo Japan has moved in with Google. It say the deal likely violates antitrust laws. It comments:

"This agreement is even more anti-competitive than Google's deal with Yahoo in the United States and Canada that the Department of Justice found to be illegal. (The) deal would have locked up 90 percent of paid search advertising. This deal gives Google virtually 100 percent of all searches in Japan, both paid and unpaid. It means there will be no search competition in Japan and that Google will end up controlling all personal search information for all Japanese consumers and businesses."

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From DailyTech: Apple just can't catch a break these days when it comes to issues surrounding its iPhones. We all know about the problems involving the iPhone 4, but complaints have also been flooding in from iPhone 3G owners.

What seemed like a kind gesture by Apple to provide iOS 4 to owners of the two-year-old iPhone 3G is turning into a bit of a mess for the boys from Cupertino. Owners who have upgraded to the latest version of iOS are witnessing massive performance slowdowns, reduced battery life, and overheating machines.

The complaints started appearing on Apple-oriented discussion forums soon after the update was released; here are just a couple of examples from Mac Rumors and the official Apple Discussions forum (38 pages long, 36 pages long).

According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is now looking into the problem, but declined to state anything more than that. IOS 4 for the iPhone 3G is already crippled relative to the versions available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 (no multitasking, no home screen wallpapers), so it remains to be seen what else could be sacrificed to improve performance on the two-year-old phone that is using the same CPU/memory configuration as the original three-year-old iPhone.

TUAW has even made the recommendation that those who haven't upgraded to iOS 4 should stay far away.

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From X-bit Labs: Nvidia Corp. on Wednesday announced that it expected revenue for the second quarter ending August 1, 2010, to be drastically lower than the guidance provided with the company's financial results for its first quarter. The company blamed poor sales of consumer graphics processing units (GPUs) as well as economic weakness in certain parts of the world.

The company that controls a huge chunk of the graphics adapters market said that its revenue for its second quarter of fiscal 2011 was estimated at $800 million to $820 million, compared with the range of $950 million to $970 million provided on May 13, 2010.

Nvidia officially explained that the revenue shortfall occurred primarily in the consumer GPU business, resulting from increased memory costs and economic weakness in Europe and China. The increased solution cost of discrete GPUs led to a greater-than-expected shift to lower-priced GPUs and PCs with integrated graphics. Nevertheless, everything may not be that easy and straightforward.

Nvidia's revenue for the Q1 of FY2011 was $1.00 billion and the revenue split was as follows:

* GPU business unit (which now includes sales of both discrete and integrated consumer graphics adapters) earned $780.9 million;
* Professional solutions business (PSB) unit (which sells Quadro- and Tesla-branded products) earned $189.7 million;
* Consumer products business (CPB) unit's revenue (which commands sales of Tegra-branded products and also absorbs game consoles royalties) was $31.2 million.

Based on the revenue split and the fact that Nvidia launched a new professional graphics solution just this week, it can be expected that the company lost sales in both consumer and professional GPU segments with GeForce and Quadro offerings. Besides, Microsoft Corp.'s canning of Kin phones probably affected sales of Tegra system-on-chip (SoC) devices that power the smartphones.

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From X-bit Labs: Advanced Micro Devices reportedly plans to start production shipments of another six-core AMD Phenom II X6 microprocessor sometime in the third quarter of 2010, according to market rumours. The new chip will make the lineup of six-core code-named Thuban processor family broader and thus more affordable to the end-user.

The new six-core processor is projected to be AMD Phenom II X6 1045T central processing unit with 9MB of cache in total, 2.70GHz clock-speed (with 3.20GHz Turbo Core speed) and 95W thermal design power. The new chip will maintain drop-in compatibility with existing AM3/AM2+ infrastructure and will likely be relatively inexpensive.

The possible introduction of a yet another six-core offering already in Q3 2010 indicates that Advanced Micro Devices is successfully ramping up production of six-core Phenom II X6 "Thuban" processors at Globalfoundries using 45nm SOI fabrication process. Earlier this year rumours emerged that the demand towards the new microprocessors is substantially increasing supply that AMD can provide.

At present AMD Phenom II X6 line consists of two six-core chips: the model 1055T and the model 1090T Black Edition. Additionally, the firm is projected to release more six-core offerings this quarter. However, the model 1045T is an unexpected product, at least for Q3 2010.

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