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CES: Spotted, First Possible Android Smartphone

A Chinese OEM was showing off a smartphone that will be running Android by March and could be for sale as soon as the second quarter. Also, hackers have forged Android-powered ultraportable computers.

One notable thing I saw on the handset front was a smartphone that could be the first Android-powered phone. The demo device from Chinese OEM Wistron runs MontaVista Linux now, but a company representative said it will be running Android by March. The hardware itself looked like a typical qwerty smartphone with the keyboard squished below a 2.5-inch screen.

PCMag said this about the specs of the device.

The GW4 we saw had surprisingly low specs, but that's a testament to the efficiency of Linux, Wistron execs said. The GW4 is based on a TI OMAP 1710 chipset with a 216-MHz processor and only 64 MB of program memory.

The MontaVista platform itself was great to use and worked very well. It was fast and efficient, and was able to handle tasks such as video playback even with the low-powered processor running the engine. The company rep staffing the booth was excited about the handset's future as an Android device. It will come in two tri-band versions, one for the U.S., and one for overseas. He wouldn't commit to exact time frames, but he said it would be for sale during the first half of this year.

This definitely falls short of what I was hoping to see at CES with respect to Android. One hardware manufacturer representative that I won't name did say he had an Android phone in his office and that it was fantastic. But he didn't bring it to the show. Nowhere did I see an actual Android handset, and I haven't seen news of one on any of the myriad tech blogs covering the show.

HTC is the only other manufacturer known to have committed to producing at least one Android handset in 2008, but its time frame is focusing on end-of-the-year availability.

In other Android news...

Leave it to the hacking community to innovate faster than any corporation. According to reports, hackers have taken the Android SDK and emulator and foisted the Linux-based OS onto a number Sharp ultraportables.

While Google's Open Handset Alliance partners toil away on creating Android handsets and services, hackers already have booted the platform on several different types of hardware. Apparently the secret sauce includes a healthy dash of ARMv5TE chip sets. This was discovered by a Hungarian team of hackers calling themselves Eu.Edge. Since this was made public, hackers have been able to boot Android on the Sharp C3000M, SL-C760, SL-C3000, and SL-6000 devices. Videos confirming the hacks are available here.

This begs the question, can Android power laptops?

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