At CTIA earlier this month, we had a chance to sit down with Qualcomm open operating system activities product manager Sy Choudhury, who walked us through Google's Android platform on a demo cell phone. Qualcomm is optimizing its chip sets for use with Android-run smartphones.

Below is a link (click on the image) to a video of Choudhury with the very same unit he showed us at the show. Choudhury's giving an illuminating, albeit short, demonstration that covers some of what he showed us at CTIA regarding Android. In it, you can see how Qualcomm optimized its Android-run test "gPhone" to run applications such as Quake (3D Game), Internet browsing, mapping and more.

Speaking of Android applications, Google recently stopped taking submissions for the first part of its $10 million Android Developers Challenge recently. Google received 1,788 entries from over 70 countries.

Google's Android product manager Azhar Hashem writes:

What I find truly amazing is how global the interest in the challenge has been. Developers from the United States submitted one-third of the total applications while the rest came from countries such as Germany, Japan, China, India, Canada, France, UK, and many others.

Categories covered by entries ranged from games to social-networking applications, to utilities, to productivity and developer tools, and much more.

Now it is time for the over 100 judges - mostly from the Open Handset Alliance, the consortium of companies that back Android - to award what they deem the most promising entries a $25,000 award to fund further development. This should happen sometime in May.

Those selected will then be eligible for even greater recognition via ten $275,000 awards and ten $100,000 awards.

Android Developer Challenge II, where the remaining $5 million will be doled out, won't begin until after the first handsets built on the platform become available. This won't happen, it appears, until at least the second half of this year.