Today’s mobile phone news round-up includes a few rumours, a few announcements and a fashion phone catwalk stroll, among other bytes and nibbles here and there. Read on for some of the latest headlines in the mobile phone industry news.

LG First ICS Mobile Out Soon?

Although the veracity of the leaked photo that identifies an LG handset is highly suspect, the photo source stated that the mobile phone in the suspiciously obvious and untraditionally logo’d photo shows that LG is about to announce its first Ice Cream Sandwich mobile phone. The model is so far identfied as the LG Optimus U1, but we aren’t holding our collective breaths.

Possibly true, perhaps. Probably true, no. Why? Lack of credibility of the source material. So if it happens, it happens. We’ll update this byte with more reliable information as it becomes available.

Joint Venture to Challenge Qualcomm Hold on Mobile Chips

Japan’s largest carrier, NTT DoCoMo, announced recently that it will join with Samsung, Panasonic, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Semiconductors, NEC and others to produce high quality semiconductors for smartphones. The joint enterprise will focus on

“feature-rich, small-size, low-power-consumption semiconductor products equipped with modem functionality”

…with special attention to LTE and LTE-Advanced technologies.

Currently, the leader in mobile technology semiconductors is the US-based firm, Qualcomm whose operations direction matches that of the joint venture participants.

If successful, the joint venture will make all of its participants less reliant on Qualcomm, and that would take a huge chunk of QC’s market share.

Fashionistas, Alert: Fashion Phone in the Offing

ZTE is rebranding the ZTE Blade into a fashion-TV phone, unoriginally called the ZTE FTV Phone. Also known as the Orange San Franciso, the Blade Fashion TV mobile phone will run on Android 2.2 Froyo but otherwise mirrors the specifications and capabilities of the original Blade.

Besides the OS difference, the FTV smartphone will come pre-loaded with lots of fashion apps, wallpaper, widgets and more.

The mobile phone model will be available in three primary colour schemes in black, gold and white, liberally decorated with FTV logos.