Samsung on Thursday hinted that the company will compete on price with its future Android smartphones. While discussing the Reclaim for Sprint, Samsung product manager Casey Ryan mentioned to the New York Times that touchscreen Android phones due next year should be available for "well under" $100, or less than half the asking price for a myTouch 3G. He didn't say what features these phones would have and how much if at all they would be scaled back compared to current Android phones.

Moving the price for Android phones downwards is both possible and crucial for the young mobile operating system. Although Google designed the software to run on as little as a 200MHz ARM processor and therefore to run on very inexpensive devices, smartphones like HTC's myTouch 3G and Samsung's own i7500 have almost always targeted the high end and have faced stiff competition from the iPhone as well as other range-topping phones like the BlackBerry Storm. A sub-$100 price removes some of that contention while also creating a viable alternative to the $99 iPhone 3G.