Video Hands-on with Qualcomm’s Android Snaptop Prototype

What’s a Snaptop? It’s Qualcomm’s clever name for a Snapdragon-powered Android tablet that comes with a neat little surprise hidden on its backside. Swinging down the nifty kickstand reveals a detachable keyboard, which communicates with the main 9-inch unit via Bluetooth. We like this idea, because typing anything longer than URLs an on-screen keyboard can be a pain, especially if it doesn’t have multitouch. Qualcomm has shown off this design before, but this time around it’s a working prototype.

The unit we played around with was definitely rough around the edges. And as you can see, this slate/smartbook hybrid kicks back a crazy amount of glare, but we like the concept. Check out the video and more details below.

The main interface of the Snaptop is definitely widget-heavy, in a good way. You can quickly access things like weather, news headlines, calendar, Web, and more with a touch of your finger on the resistive screen. We fired up a 720p video trailer, by clicking on Hot Movies, and the Snaptop offered smooth full-screen playback. You can also output videos via the HDMI port. Along the bottom of the Snaptop there are touch sensitive controls for things like Home and Back, and you’ll also find a tiny trackball.

The keyboard is a bit on the cramped side, and it took more effort than we’d like to detach and re-attach it to the tablet. However, the feedback was decent, and the keyboard module has its own little trackball (a nice touch). When you have the Snaptop propped up using the kickstand, we could definitely see people using this device in the kitchen or living room, but you wouldn’t be able to use this kind of setup in your lap.

As we expected, Snaptop successfully loaded our image-heavy homepage and quickly loaded some Google searches. What you don’t get is Flash support, which hasn’t yet come to the Android platform. We also couldn’t dig much beyond the main menu to see what sorts of apps this tablet could handle. Overall, though, Snaptop has potential. With some refinements we couldn’t definitely see a carrier offering something like this.