Currently in an Android application that I\'m developing I\'m looping through the pixels of an image to blur it. This takes about 30 seconds on a 640x480 image.
This is a shot in the dark, but you might try shrinking the image and then enlarging it again. This can be done with Bitmap.createScaledBitmap(Bitmap src, int dstWidth, int dstHeight, boolean filter). Make sure and set the filter parameter to true. It'll run in native code so it might be faster.