It’s the first Samsung device to run Android OS 2.1. and the first Samsung device in South Korea. Kind of a big deal when they’re supposed to do a lot with this whole Bada thing. Called the SHW-M100S, the new device will arrive in March on SK Telecom. This means I can head over to the random SK Telecom store I found in Little Korea and maybe be able to get my hands on it.

Some early features/specs listed:
Android 2.1 with TouchWIZ UI
800MHz processor
3.7″ AMOLED touchscreen (WVGA),
5 megapixel camera with 720p video capture
802.11n
Full GPS
T-DMB mobile broadcast TV

Not too shabby!

I  made it my mission to handle every Android device at CES 2010…and believe me, there were a lot of Taiwanese manufacturers cranking out random ass Android-based devices…but there were also a fair amount of major companies showing off new phones and new uses of the platform.

LG actually debuted a new Android phone at CES with pretty much no fanfare whatsoever and a very forgettable name (GT540)…however,  it’s actually a pretty slick phone destined for Europe and Asia. Sorry, fellow Yanks.

GT540 specs that LG is advertising:

• Custom theme and active widget (I guess it’s just one of each)
• Social Networking Manager:  Linkbook 1.3, SNS Widget, Dedicated Client
• Motion UI player
• DivX and WMV support
• 3Megapixel camera with face detection and tagging as well as camera effects
• Support for LG 3Way Sync

This phone totally has the Y2K bug.

Click that picture to enlarge it and see what I’m talking about.

LG surprised me with its new smartphones, and I actually ranked the Expo’s keyboard as the best of the dozen or so new devices I tested. There was another LG Android device there which has already been released, so I’m going to have to update my “every handset” list.

Up next: Huawei’s unbranded Android sets (including 2 camera model), Broadcom VOIP units, Android-powered microwave, and more!

When we first saw Android 1.6 (donut) long long ago, we heard about the accessibility features afforded by the text-to-speech engine made by SVOX.  By default, your donut device doesn’t have the speech libraries loaded, and you have to add them yourself.  Eclair-based devices such as the Motorola Droid, however, come with the speech function fully loaded and ready to rock.

To turn it on, go to Menu> settings > accessibility, click on the “accessibility” checkbox, and then click on the “TalkBack” checkbox.  A warning box pops up telling you that it will read things such as credit card numbers aloud and that it “may be able to collect the data you type, ” so be careful..

When you have TalkBack turned on, all it really does is verbally tell you where you are, such as the home screen, sub-menus or URLs.  It also reads pop-up messages and warnings, but that’s the limit of it.

But I started thinking the other day that maybe TalkBack could come in handy if I could highlight text and have it read aloud, sort of like what you can do on many Kindle books, and what you can do with Speech in OS X.   Since I have to edit other people’s documents for work, I’m always using speech.  I even have a macro set up to highlight all text in this one field and automatically launch the voice reader.  So yeah, I thought it would be cool to have TalkBack read my Google News or Techmeme headlines to me as I’m driving or walking the dog or something.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a solution that doesn’t require the installation of another application.  I try to highlight and copy text with menu-e on the Droid, which then copies my selection to the clipboard.  But then I have no access to the clipboard to read my selection.

So what the hell…I downloaded Talking RSS Reader by Google Engineer Stephanie Doyon, which integrates with Google Reader.   It doesn’t use the nice built-in Android reader voice, but the Linux text-to-speech voice which I now equate with the dumb smiley face on the OLPC “Speak” program.  I got my niece an XO-1 for Christmas last year, and she spent quite a lot of time playing with the Speak app, making it just go “fhfhahfhfhehehehehnfmsisisisioep” and such…over and over and over.

This is the guy I picture reading my RSS feeds in Talking RSS Reader. Or more accurately, I picture him reading every single bit of text in every article in my feed in order.  When you use this app, half of the time it’s going to be saying things like “image link, image link, image link,  image link, image link”  and other such useless info that I don’t want to hear. It’s the worst in blogs because it reads all the usernames, link names, comments, and stuff.   Talking RSS reader is free and alright, but it’s better for reading the full text of articles in sequential order rather than just reading headlines.  I want something that will just speak all the headlines to me in a clear voice, and have speech recognition so I can say something like “read that one!” and it will stop its listing and drill down into the article I chose.  That kind of app would be awesome for commuters, and I guess I have to continue my search.

Talking RSS reader crashed on me quite a few times when I was playing with it, but it didn’t ever throw up an error message.  The app just silently closed, which I guess is kind of less annoying, but still bad.  I won’t uninstall this yet, as I intend to use it in the car, but it’s really not quite what I had in mind.

Today, Android SDK Tech lead Xavier Ducrohet announced Android 2.0 support in the SDK, which unveils some of the big capabilities in the latest version of Android, expected to hit the market soon on at least one of Verizon’s upcoming “Droid” devices. In the developer video posted today, for instance, all the new features were shown off on a device connected to the Verizon network, and the release notes say it will be deployable in November.

The keyword with Eclair is interoperability.

Motorola recently launched its custom Android build with a UI called MotoBLUR, the central function of which is the ability to integrate with a user’s many social web services from a single interface. The new APIs included in Eclair give this communicative function to all developers. So with the new Account Manager API, developers can centrally store account credentials on the device, the Contacts application can now sync and aggregate contact data from multiple accounts, and the Sync Adaptors API provides full two-way contact sync with ANY backend.

To provide a single, unified face for this data, the Quick Contact function has been added. By clicking on a contact’s picture, a user can pull up a menu of all the different ways to reach that contact…Gmail, Email, IM, Phone, and the various Social networks. It’s like the existent “live folder” concept for contacts, but brought together under the standard contact list, or in any app the developer chooses.

Android 2.0 also updates the Bluetooth API so apps can now access Bluetooth controls to discover, connect and share information with nearby devices, which unlocks the ability to make peer-to-peer and proximity-based applications.

The built-in Android browser has been updated with a refreshed UI with an actionable address bar, bookmarks sorted by thumbnail, double-tap zoom command, and HTML5 support, which opens up Application cache, client-side SQL databases, geolocation API support, and fullscreen video tag support.

The camera app has again been tweaked, but this time it includes digital zoom (with macro mode), built-in color effects (posterize, solarize, etc) and built-in flash support.

It even adds Exchange Support and includes Multi-touch support for the soft keyboard.

Throw this out there with the upcoming availability of Verizon Droids, the Sony Racheal, and whatever else is coming out, and we’ve got a really huge quarter for Android. I’m gonna start doing video blogs soon, it just takes a bit longer to write and record them.

If there’s one thing that Android Bakery is about, it’s giant foam pastries being dropped on Google’s lawn, and apparently the customary giant eclair has made its grand debut.

I’m going to make two predictions, one a longshot, one more logical.

Here are the factors adding up:

1.) Verizon’s Getting an Android phone (and we now know Eric Schmidt’s boner for Verizon)

2.) At the Google earnings call late in the day today, Eric Schmidt says, “Android adoption is about to explode.”

3.) …on the same day the giant Eclair lands?

Prediction one (longshot) Verizon is getting the first Android 2.0 phone.

I mean, they only released the Donut SDK last month…and we first heard about that in May. BUT if you remember, as I’m sure you do, they showed off all the Donut features at Google I/O not even one month after the big foam Cupcake dropped and all our G1s updated.

It’s too early in Android’s lifespan to be able to predict these kind of trends, but dropping a comically huge representation of the OS’s codename is about as obvious a hint as you could hope to receive. Something with Eclair is going to happen very soon.

What sucks is that we don’t know anything about Eclair, really. So that leads me to my second, and probably more likely prediction:

Verizon and AT&T will be getting their Android phones at the same time as Sprint and T-Mobile gets their new devices, summarily “exploding” the OS onto all United States carriers with four new devices…then after the five minutes of pants-pooping is over, and tons of new Android users are born, we’ll get to see an early build of Eclair to tease the new users with sick new upcoming features.

Also, Michael Arrington commented on the article I linked to above, saying he’s seen a new Android device that’ll “blow everyone away.” (I could have the quote wrong, but that’s the gist of it.) I’m hoping it’s Rachael from Sony Ericsson, because that looks really hot. But hell, it could be something even better.

All of this, combined with the daily media coverage making the “duh!” prediction that Android is on its way to market domination make it a very good time to be an Android early adopter, and everyone who’s going through the 528MHz generation right now has my personal permission to refer to himself as an “O.G.”

…or something less dorky.