But if last quarter’s earnings call is a guide, we’ll end up hearing a lot about CPC — the cost that Google charges search advertisers for every click.

Wall Street freaked out three months ago because Google’s CPC declined for the first time in years. And the same thing could happen this time out, as well — several analysts are predicting a 10 percent CPC drop for Q1 earnings today.

And if that does happen, Google executives will end up making the same argument they made last time: Chill out! If our prices have gone down, that’s no big deal, because we’re selling a lot more stuff. Microsoft has yet to slow Google’s growth, and Facebook doesn’t seem to be doing that, either.

This is a pretty persuasive argument, and this is what it looks like in chart form: A couple years’ worth of real and estimated search advertising growth, via Nomura analyst Brian Nowak. That growth doesn’t all accrue to Google, but as long as Google gets the lion’s share of it, it’s hard to get freaked out about pricing. You really can make it up on volume.

Speaking of volume:

The transaction, which allows Sony to purchase LCD panels from Samsung at market prices without bearing the responsibility and costs of operating the facility that manufactures them, is expected to save the company some $640 million a year.

That’s significant savings for Sony, which last month warned that it would lose money, for the fourth year in a row, in its current financial year. But is it enough to set the company’s once-core business on the road to recovery? Remember, Sony’s TV division has lost money for seven straight years.

“It’s a step forward for Sony,” Nomura analyst Shiro Mikoshiba told Bloomberg. “Canceling out the venture enables Sony to become more flexible in procuring panels. Still, Sony continues to face falling prices and heavy fixed costs.”

I live in downtown Los Angeles, where 3G coverage is a given, and not only is the 3G wonky and unreliable, but oftentimes I’m struggling to even get decent Edge support! Edge is absolutely worse on my new 3G than it ever was on my first-generation iPhone. Adding insult to injury, I drop multiple calls every day, something that rarely happened before my ‘upgrade.’ “

– A post to Apple’s iPhone 3G discussion forum

Good thing the iPhone was chosen as Time Magazine’s 2007 Invention of the Year, because a growing chorus of discontent suggests its successor is unworthy of the honor in 2008. Voice and data reception issues have been troubling the device for weeks now and it seems the blame for them lies not with the network carriers, but with Apple (AAPL) itself. On Wednesday, T-Mobile Netherlands stepped forward to blame Apple for the reception issues with the iPhone 3G. “We suspect that it is a hardware/ software-specific issue of the iPhone itself,” the company said in a (poorly translated) blog post. In Australia, Vodafone also blamed the iPhone 3G’s reception issues on Apple. In Sweden, engineering weekly Ny Teknik claims that iPhone 3G’s sensitivity to third-generation wireless network signals is well below the 3G standard.

In the states, “well-placed sources” have told BusinessWeek that the Infineon Technologies (IFX) chip Apple chose for the handset is undermining its performance. And they are not the first to make such claims. Earlier this week, Nomura analyst Richard Windsor fingered the device’s chipset as the problem as well. “The 3G iPhone has been out for a month, but signs of problems are appearing that should give competitors some breathing space,” Windsor said in a report to clients. “Problems include high incidence of dropped calls, switching onto EDGE while the device is stationary and loss of reception while in good coverage. We believe that these issues are typical of an immature chipset and radio protocol stack where we are almost certain Infineon is the 3G supplier.”

So if that’s truly the case, what’s the solution? A firmware upgrade, most likely. Those “well-placed sources” mentioned earlier say Apple and Infineon are prepping one for September release. In the meantime, the companies are sticking with time-tested workaround: “no comment.“