One of the things that I really hate about the mobile phone industry today is that they won’t just give you a good price. All of the carriers want to offer you a price that looks good, but what you really pay is often much more than that until a mail-in rebate comes in. Thankfully, Best Buy Mobile is cutting through the crap and offers all of the good prices with instant rebates in its stores.

The latest deals include the Sprint HTC Hero and Samsung Moment each for $99 with instant rebates applied. That means no paying more and waiting to get your money back. Both phones are originally priced at $179.

Want to spend a cool $650 on a feature-rich digital photo frame? Today is your lucky day. This one is the first digital photo frame to be powered by Google’s Android. It will do RSS feeds and weather updates, along with the usual displaying of loved ones.

This 10.4-inch digital photo frame even has a dedicated email address of it’s own, allowing you to send your pictures to it for display. It will also grab images from sites like Flickr and Picasa. You can deliver your pictures to the device via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB or SD card.

Traditionally the vast majority of Samsung mobile devices run Windows Mobile. WinMo is falling out of fashion with many mobile phone makers and phone users in the face of competition from Android and other phone operating systems.

Reports are coming in that Samsung is going to be significantly reducing the number of handsets that it produces with WinMo and moving them to Android. Analyst Greg Noh claims that in 2010 the WinMo handsets in the Samsung line will drop from 80% range today to 50%.

What with all of the Droid excitement, it’s easy to forget LG’s GW620, LG’s first Android smartphone. And so you won’t forget about it, the LG GW620 now has its own mini-site. The page appears to be a work in progress, but there are two video demos, some stock photos, and the user manual and spec sheet for download.

The GW620 will be a dualband UMTS (900/2100) quadband GSM device, with WiFi and Bluetooth. It has either 2GB or 4GB of internal storage, along with a microSD card slot, and a 5-megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash. The touchscreen is a 3-inch HVGA resistive panel, while the OS is Android 1.5 Cupcake with LG’s own S-Class UI running on top.

Looks like both TomTom and Garmin might be having a bit of a bad day to put it mildly, thanks to the announcement of Google Maps Navigation. As the graph shows, things are not looking good. Nope. Not at all.

GPS makers can at least take some comfort in the fact that the new Google Maps Navigation is available on Android 2.0 at the moment, which requires you to have a specific phone to download the maps real time. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Google has unveiled Maps Navigation (beta), an upgraded version of the current Maps software that will be free and apparently available on all Android 2.0 devices. You get all of the usual Maps features, along with being able to search by the name of a business and it will even suggest the closest matches and traffic data.

There’s also turn-by-turn navigation with a female robotic voice and integration with satellite and street view. Street view will be able to show you what lane you need to be in when exiting the highway, for instance. It will also now search along the route when you’re looking for gas stations or fast food. Some addresses can be added to the Android home screen as icons too.

The Motorola DROID will hit Verizon on November 6th for $199 on contract. That’s after a $100 mail-in rebate. The DROID itself is the first of many Android phones coming to the carrier. There’s Android 2.0 of course, Visual Voicemail, a 3.7-inch display (854 x 480 resolution), 5 megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, a bundled 16GB memory card and a beta version of Google Maps Navigation.

The DROID is the first phone to offer that last, which which will turn Google Maps into a turn-by-turn routing system. Some other features include a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 3G, WiFi, voice-activated search and over-the-air Amazon MP3 downloads.

We don’t have much info. Just a small image and a few specs at the moment, but it looks like NEC is working on a mobile business tablet PC that looks to be Android based. The touchscreen tablet has a 7- to 8-inch LCD display and NEC is apparently predicting that they’ll eventually ship over 1m of the UMPCs each year. So they seem pretty confident.

We don’t even have a name for the device yet, but it’s set to go on sale in Japan this fall. NEC is boasting that it’s a fast-booting device with heavy use of cloud-storage and cloud-computing “capable as a personal computer”.

We have been fielding robots of all sorts on the battlefield for a while now, typically associated with finding and disposing of bombs and other explosive devices. I always thought when Android’s hit the battlefield they would be packing laser cannons and the visage of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Apparently, the first Android to hit the battlefield will be in the form of Google’s open source OS and cheap computer terminals.

Raytheon has announced its RATS battlefield networking system will be powered by Android. The system will allow troops in the field to coordinate with other combatants and gain access to other assets. Presumably, these other assets would include air strikes and drones.

The Alex looks similar to the Android-powered Barnes & Noble reader, but this one sports a 6-inch display using monochrome e-ink (not color), but it also has a secondary 3.5-inch color touchscreen that lets you browse the Web.

Yeah, VERY similar to that Barnes and Noble reader. Spring Design claims that it’s “enlisting major content partners, and plans to release the Alex for selected strategic partners by the end of this year.” Interesting.

Acer looks like they mean business in the cell phone market, having officially announced the Acer Liquid, Acer’s first Android-powered smartphone. This is truly something to drool over, as it will be powered by Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor. It will be the first Android-device to use the processor. Liquid=drool.

This one features a high-definition WVGA capacitive touchscreen, and will be powered by Android 1.6. We don’t have an official release date or pricing info yet, but that info should drop soon. We’ll let you know.

I am not a big fan of alternative OS’; I prefer to use what I know and what my software works with in the form of one flavor or another of Windows. I do admit that Android has my interest piqued and I would like to play with the OS a bit. If you feel the same way, the Acer Aspire One with Android and Windows XP is available for pre-order now.

Amazon.com is offering the netbook for pre-order at $349.99 with free shipping. That is a great price considering the machines has both Android and Windows. Other specs include a 10.1-inch screen, Intel Atom N280 processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 160GB HDD.

Well look what we have here. Archos has finally released their latest PMP, with the Android-based Archos 5 Internet Tablet now available from Amazon here in the U.S. and from other retailers the world over.

Right now, only the 160GB ($389.99) and the 32GB ($369.99) models are available for purchase. The 500GB ($499.99) model is still in pre-order limbo. The other capacities that were previously-announced will presumably come later.

T-Mobile’s latest Android set is a full-touch handset that has a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, flash, and video recording. Some other features include a 3.2-inch AMOLED display, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, and microSD expansion up to 16GB.

The Behold II also features the company’s TouchWiz UI with a 3D cube menu that will let you rotate through multimedia features like web browsing and YouTube etc. Nothing on pricing or availability yet, but you can expect it by the holidays.

It’s been a while since we heard anything about the Android-powered Skytone Alpha 680 netbook. You’ve probably forgotten all about it. We almost did.

Anyhow, some live pictures of the device have surfaced once again. And yes, the 7-inch touchscreen netbook looks nice as ever. Turns out there’s a reason the netbook hasn’t been very social as of late. Word has it that the device is still “not really stable”, which is pretty sad this late in the game.