This year a slew of companies have launched competing Android tablet devices. A lot of rhetoric has been spun about how Android's open source ecosystem gives manufacturers and consumers an advantage. Unfortunately, the current crop of Android tablets aren't nurturing open source at all.

ARCHOS, the French multimedia tablet manufacturer, has announced two new touch-screen tablets that run Google's open source Android operating system

A Google executive has stated that Android 2.2 is not optimized for tablet computers, and that in particular, Android Market will not run properly on tablets. Meanwhile, the Android 2.2 based Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet will be offered by Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and Sprint, say reports.

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently spoke about large screen Android Tablets at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit keynote (at timecode 10 minutes and 39 seconds). It’s a nice way of Eric Schmidt to indirectly confirm that Google is definitely going to support the development of Android based Tablets as alternatives on the market to the upcoming iPad.

I am typing this as I am finally connected in shell to my Android phone. The prompt reminds me that it's based on the Linux kernel (it's free), the Dalvik virtual machine (it's free), and free libraries. Millions of Android devices are shipped every day, each one is a Linux system. Today, it's phone.

Next week at Computex, Via Technologies' WonderMedia Technologies subsidiary will demonstrate low-cost Android-based tablets based on the ARM9-based, 600MHz WonderMedia Prizm processor and related "SmartTouch" reference designs. The tablets will be manufactured by a variety of Chinese manufacturers, and sold for as low as $100 in the U.S. later this year, says Bloomberg.

Along with Bigfoot, the lost city of Atlantis, and the Bermuda Triangle, the lack of Android tablets continues to be an unsolved mystery.

At this year's Mobile World Congress(MWC) in Barcelona, while Microsoft announced its Windows Phone 7 Series this week, a number of other companies are announcing their new Android-based devices. The open source Android OS devices, which range from mobile phones and notebooks, to tablets and Internet Devices, include updates to popular well known handsets and several new mobiles.

HTC dominates the Android phone market but other mobile makers are picking up the Android pace. The majority of Android-based mobile phones released to date have been made by HTC but there are also a number of other Android phones worth considering. We look at some of the alternatives to HTC if you're determined to own an Android phone.