Acer Liquid puts Android 1.6 on Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset

There's already one smartphone running on Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset, the Toshiba TG-01, but being Windows Mobile-based, it's a little harder to get excited about than the Acer Liquid - Acer's first Android-based phone running on Android 1.6 (aka Donut).

This makes the Acer Liquid the first announced smartphone to introduce Android to the Snapdragon platform, although after poking around a system dump of an unannounced HTC phone dubbed the HTC Dragon, hackers are claiming that HTC are planning to do the same thing.

The Liquid features a finger-friendly WVGA (800 x 480) capacitive touch screen, HSPA (7.2 to 21 Mbps downlink) connectivity, a camera with ISO control, geo-tagging and auto-focus, and of course, a 1GHz processor with 3D capabilities that should blow any current smartphones (bar the TG-01) out of the water.

On the software side, Acer are touting a power management system that will please even "intense users", integration of your address book with real-time updates from a variety of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, a customized GUI, and an application called Spinlets which promises free streaming music and video that can be shared with friends and family - although we have no doubt that the "free" part won't include the data charges from your carrier.

Despite the official announcement, there's no word on price or release date, although back in June, Digitimes claimed that Acer would be releasing an Android phone in November 2009. All we can tell you is that you'll be able to pick up an Acer Liquid in red, white or black.