How to check if an android device has a wireless card that supports promiscuous or monitor mode? How can I check to see if my (rooted) android device has a wireless card that supports either monitor mode or promiscuous mode?
Unfortunately you need root to be able to do that, despite you saying it, but thought it would be useful to leave that in here for others :)

All modern wireless cards chipsets would may have that feature to be able to sniff/monitor, but as Matthew Read pointed out in the comments below, its a grey area in terms of driver support.

When you issue the binary command ifconfig there's a 'promisc' switch to tell it to go into promiscuous mode to enable monitoring/sniffing.