Image Credit: Tech Radar

Google’s Chrome OS might have the focus today, but Qualcomm made sure that people don’t forget about Android. The company showed off a smartbook concept made by Quanta and powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform. Although this is the same chipset running in some high-end smartphones, the Snapdragon chip isn’t underclocked — it’s powering Android on the full 1GHz speed on the Cortex-A8 architecture.

Bill Timmons of Qualcomm envisions smartbooks in the same price range as a smartphone, but I think that’s a tough challenge, barring the subsidy factor. While the devices have the guts of a smartphone, there’s still a larger display to pay for. If these devices are too close in price to netbooks, I suspect that netbooks will win out with most consumers — people will perceive the fuller featured netbook running the familiar Windows OS as a better value. Anything over $200 and I just don’t see smartbooks becoming successful. And while I was leaning towards Chrome OS boosting the slow starting smartbook market, the lack of application support brings me back to Android as a potential operating system for smartbooks and netbooks.

The Verizon Droid is soon to be returned to the kind folks there who sent me this evaluation phone so it’s time for a video look at the phone. The Droid is the Android 2.0 slider that is thin and light, and sports an industrial design bent. In the video I show the responsiveness of the Droid, the hardware and give a feel for the web browsing experience. I also show the camera function, including how long it takes to focus and shoot.

I have been impressed with the Droid, and will be sad to see it go. It is a very capable smartphone compared to the many I have tried. I find it is easily the best phone on the Verizon network currently.

The company behind Fring has announced it has landed on the Android platform. Android joins the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, S60 and other platforms to support the ability to make free calls using Fring. The app is available in the Android Market and works with Skype, MSN, GoogleTalk, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo! and AIM for both calls and chat sessions.

I was excited to hear about the new Solution Center for Android alliance formed by ARM and 35 other companies to pool resources to aid development efforts for Android on the ARM platform. Smartbooks are in essence the merging of the smartphone and netbooks, and Android is a logical platform for them. To have such a major effort focused on getting ARM devices produced for Android can only be a good thing for both the platform, and for getting interesting mobile devices to market.

Smartbooks are not the only likely product of this alliance; it is easy to envision web tablets and other consumer devices appear with Android on board. As the alliance press release indicates, ARM-based products are designed to be “always connected” by nature, and that can mean devices of all kinds. Android just got a lot more interesting, in my view. I wonder how Android will fit in with the Google Chrome OS poising for takeoff?

I just received the weekly newsletter from eReader and they snuck in a biggie:

Sure enough, just go to www.ereader.com/android from your phone and download the app. The Android version supports working with the eReader online store and the user online bookshelf. I can tell you one thing — the Droid’s big screen makes it a fantastic e-book reader. The only complaint so far is no justification of the text, a pet-peeve of mine.

The camera in the Droid has been the focus of numerous user complaints who feel that a sophisticated 5 MP camera with flash and auto-focus should take better pictures. I have posted pictures I’ve taken with the Droid that show a fuzzy lack of focus, and I have regularly found the camera to fail to focus properly. The problem with auto-focus has definitely been wide-spread, although not every user has seen it. It may be a moot point as users are reporting that the Droid has started focusing properly every time, with no change to the phone.

I can say that the Droid I am evaluating has started working flawlessly, with no action on my part. The auto-focus works well every single time now, where before it was a seldom seen thing. I have not reset the Droid, nor seen any evidence from Verizon nor Motorola that a fix has been pushed to the phone. Based on my own experience, and that being reported by Droid owners, I am confident that a fix has been pushed OTA.

Here are two photos shot in a simple “point and click” mode, using auto-focus. You can see the difference easily.

It sounds pretty certain that AT&T is dipping its toe in the Android pool within the next few months. The Dell Streak, captured on video last month, looks to be coming to AT&T in 2010 if you believe the Commercial Times out of China, says SlashGear. From what we’ve seen so far, the device appears to have a 5″ display, runs Android 2.0 and offers integrated 3G connectivity. The 800 x 480 resolution looks much better than it does on my 7″ UMPC, as well. I’d say Dell has nailed the screen size and resolution on this device. The Streak looks a bit big for a traditional phone, but nobody has confirmed if the device supports cellular voice — besides a Bluetooth headset works wonders.

That actually leads to an interesting question since I’ve generally been against a handheld that doesn’t offer cellular voice capabilities. Could a full-featured smartphone-like device be successful without the phone part? The most obvious example of a yes answer is Apple’s iPod Touch, but I can’t envision myself using a basic phone for voice and an iPod Touch for everything else. Of course, the Touch doesn’t have integrated wireless broadband, only Wi-Fi, so maybe I’d feel differently if the handheld had an always-on connection. Again, I’m not suggesting that the Dell Streak will be data only, but it does make me wonder about just such a device.

While we ponder that, here’s another look at the Dell Streak from last month.

Welcome to our newest Monday feature — Android Ecosystem! While some folks are bandying around different sales numbers for the Motorola Droid — estimates range between 200,000 and 250,000 in the first week — others are more concerned about the state of the Android Marketplace. Jason Kincaid penned an interesting piece on how Google needs a desktop application store. Apple certainly has one in iTunes, but as Jason admits in his article, 90 percent of iPhone software purchases are made over the air according to an AdMob survey.

I’m not representative of your mainstream consumer, but I can’t remember the last time — or even the first time — that I looked for software in the iTunes store on a computer. I don’t think a desktop app store alone is the answer, but it wouldn’t hurt — instead, Google needs to continue revamping its mobile Android Marketplace to make it easier to find apps. I’m not against Jason’s suggestion to revamp the existing Google Android Marketplace website with a “buy here and push to phone” software store. While that would be useful, I don’t see much value added — the best mobile solution is to have customers find what they need for their handset right on their handset, not in front of a computer. Google can start by making better use of screen real estate in the Market — I find that the large “Update” and “Install” buttons are too big and there’s too much scrolling in general when look at an application’s details. Is it just me?

While we ponder and debate Android software approaches, let’s not forget that some new hardware is due out this week. The Samsung Behold II arrives for T-Mobile customers on Wednesday. That price of admission nets you a 3.2″ AMOLED touchscreen display, Samsung’s TouchWIZ interface riding atop Android 1.6, a 2 GB microSD card, Wi-Fi, 3G and 5 megapixel camera. I’ve read two different price tags for the Behold II — $199 and $229 — and Samsung’s official press release does nothing to clarify a price. I’m thinking $199 is the cost later this week because we’re starting to see real competition to get good smartphones under the $199 barrier after subsidy.

The smartphone sector is one of the fastest moving sectors in the mobile tech space. New phones appear almost daily, and the resultant race for the latest and greatest is a hectic one. Savvy consumers may be the only ones concerned about technical details such as OS version installed on a given phone, but it can make a big difference when it comes time to make a purchase. It is not always a given that smartphone X will get the next big OS upgrade, and even if it does the timing of said upgrade is not always fast. That leads to the question — how fast is fast enough for smartphone upgrades?

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I am working in a Panera Bread today and I feel like one of those shady street counterfeit product hawkers. I have the original iPhone, Droid and a Palm Pre on the table in front of me, attracting a lot of attention. I have been comparing the three phones and I thought it made sense to shoot a simple “grab and shoot” picture using all three phones for comparison.

I am no professional photographer, and while I’m sure I could have tweaked the settings on each of the phone cameras, I wanted to simulate the way most people use their camera phone. You see something interesting, grab the phone and snap a pic. That’s all I did here, so each of the photos reflects the default settings for each camera. The photos were taken one after the other, and the camera was the same distance from the subject in each.  Here are the three photos taken and some that show the sizes of the three phones: