CES 2010: Android rides again

After Google stole the CES thunder with its Nexus One launch, and with phone makers holding back for next month’s Mobile World Congress, you might have thought this week would be all quiet on the Android front.But the little green man has been spotted around Las Vegas a few times.Motorola’s Backfip is an Android 2.1 QWERTY phone with a slide-and-pivot action geared towards entertainment and web browsing. The makers have primed the interface for viewing snaps taken on the 5MP cam, and we could see that hitting shelves in the next couple of months.Meanwhile HP quietly outed a proof of concept ’droid netbook running on a Snapdragon chip, though other spec was thin on the ground. Techcrunch also got wind of the company working on an Android version of the Windows 7 slate (pictured) shown off by Steve Ballmer during his keynote speech.Lenovo announced its LePhone, a China-bound Android blower running Android 1.6 on a 1GHz Snapdragon. Sadly, that’s unlikely to hit these shores. That said, Dell announced plans to launch its Mini 3 Android smartie (previously available only in China and Brazil) in the States. Can the European phone market invasion be far behind for these two PC giants?This CES has been flooded with slates and ereaders like the Spring Design Alex (pictured), many of which are also running Google’s open-source mobile OS on Nvidia’s new Tegra 2 platform. Android-flavoured highlights include T-Mobile’s Vega tablet and Dell’s new 5-inch pocket slate. But even after all that, the Android event of the week was Google’s own announcement. If you haven’t already, check out our hands-on with the Nexus One.