After last year's CES fiasco and the non-launch of a Snapdragon device in June, this is what it's come to: the no really, manufacturers love our platform press release. According to Qualcomm, HTC, LG, ASUS, Samsung and other leading device manufacturers have created more than 30 device designs based on Snapdragon chipsets. No word on when these will come to market though. Sigh. In a more meaningful announcement, Qualcomm claims to have doubled the power of Snapdragon with its new dual-CPU, single chip, QSD8672 running up to 1.5GHz. The chip is designed for low-power pocketable or netbook-style devices and should be out the door for sampling sometime in the first half of 2009. Hear that Intel? AMD's not the only cat looking to soil your Atom sandbox.

Read -- Hey look at all our vaporgear
Read -- Dual-CPU QSD8672

While we haven't found an official press release on the subject, AVING is reporting a June 2008 retail release of a Samsung Snapdragon MID. This according to a Qualcomm official. It's unclear to what extent Sammy's device will make good on Snapdragon's list of "supported" features like 12 megapixel camera, GPS, HD video playback, WiFi, Bluetooth, all day battery life, digital broadcast television (MediaFLO, DVB-H, and/or USDB-T) and dual-mode EV-DO Rev. B and UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA riding atop a 1GHz processor and Qualcomm's 600MHz always-on DSP. All we've got is this picture of an engineering prototype (actually based on Snapdragon this time) on display right now at the World IT Show.

HTC's hit us with some sexy new handsets lately, but a new report from DigiTimes says that the juggernaut ODM is getting ready to make some MID waves, and soon. Apparently inspired by the success of the Eee (who hasn't been?), HTC is rumored to be prepping devices based on Intel's Atom and Qualcomm's Snapdragon platforms, as well as up to 10 new phones in the second quarter of the year -- which, conveniently enough, is this quarter. There's no word on what we might be seeing apart from some new Diamond and Touch Pro handsets, but hopefully we'll see soon enough -- or just be left broken-hearted by yet another unsourced DigiTimes rumor.

As if things weren't confusing enough in the world of tiny computers, Qualcomm went and blurted off news about a $299 machine that will run Windows Mobile 7 on its Snapdragon mobile chip set. Qualcomm's senior veep Luis Pineda boasted that the machine will run WinMo7 and is more efficient than its competitors from the likes of Intel, AMD, and Via. When pressed, he wouldn't give up any additional hardware specs, but he promises a "big presence in Snapdragon-based devices at CES 2009". This isn't the first time we've seen mention of Windows Mobile 7, but it's quite possibly the first tie-in with a specific product group. We look forward to the Snapdragon-Intel-AMD-Via mobile computing war in the coming year, indeed.

We seriously have no idea what Qualcomm was thinking here, but it turns out that those two so-called "Snapdragon prototypes" being shown at CES this year... wait for it... don't use the Snapdragon platform. Now, that would've been just fine with us had Qualcomm made it clear that they were built using its existing chipsets, but they didn't. Here's the best part: Qualcomm actually contacted us with a minor correction on our original story (they wanted us to point out that their ARM-based cores are highly customized) without bothering to mention that our "Snapdragon-powered" statement was not accurate. Anyway, it turns out that the Anchorage and Fairbanks prototypes are merely meant to demonstrate "examples of what Snapdragon-enabled devices will feature," which begs the question: if the current MSM series chipsets are capable of the same functionality, aren't those probably the wrong features to be demonstrating? That behavior walks a fine line between poorly executed PR and outright deception, Qualcomm, and we'd ask that you not let it happen again.

[Thanks, Sascha]

We sat down with one of Qualcomm's fancy new reference designs today, the Anchorage QWERTY slider phone. Let's be perfectly clear -- the Inventec-crafted device won't ever see the light of day in this exact form, Qualcomm just needed some eye candy with which to demonstrate its new Snapdragon platform. The chipset features a highly specialized and customized ARM-based core and graphics from ATI -- both actually licensed this time around, we're told -- and tries to take advantage of as many technologies that Snapdragon offers as possible: MediaFLO support, blazing clock speeds (1GHz to be exact), high resolutions (SVGA here), and the list goes on. Snapdragon-powered devices should hit retail from HTC and Samsung by the end of the year. Click on for pics, just don't get too attached since this is as close as you'll ever get to it, alright?

Let's put aside Qualcomm's legal woes for just a moment and turn our attention to something a little more interesting and heartwarming: awesome-looking prototype devices. The company is showing off a pair of reference designs showcasing its new Snapdragon chipset, a heap of silicon said to offer one of the best power to performance ratios in the mobile world. First up, the "Fairbanks" is Qualcomm's idea of what a next-gen dedicated GPS unit might look like, rocking a 3 megapixel still / video camera, TV tuner, and microSD expansion on some sort of custom Windows CE base. Next up, the "Anchorage" (pictured) does the typical slide-out QWERTY smartphone concept in pure style with one critical difference -- this one is humming along at a staggering 1GHz. It's got pretty much every kind of radio one could want or need and apparently has enough horsepower to hoist a full OS, which only serves to further our deep, dark depression that they're not-for-retail concepts.