By Paula Bernier, Executive Editor, IP Communications Magazines
Google’s (News – Alert) Eric Schmidt reports that at least 65,000 mobile phones based on the Android (News – Alert) operating system are being shipped every day, and that the Google OS is running on 34 devices in 49 countries around the world.
What’s more, Schmidt says he expects Android to be the No. 1 or No. 2 mobile phone player.
The Google leader foreshadowed as much late last year, as TMCnet reported .
“Android adoption is literally about to explode,” Schmidt was quoted in the October 2009 piece as saying.
Around the same time, Gartner (News – Alert) predicted that Android, which at the time ran on less than 2 percent of all smartphones, would power 18 percent of the global smartphone market in 2012. That, TMCnet reported, would be a strong enough performance to put Android second among global smartphone operating systems, behind Nokia’s Symbian.
“By almost any measure, that would be a stunning advance for an OS working on only a single phone model about a year ago,” TMCnet’s Gary Kim (News – Alert) wrote at the time.
Indeed. As I wrote in the November issue of NGN Magazine , I thought the Android would have little momentum, given so many iPod users who already had built up libraries of music, video and applications seemed sure to go for the iPhone. (And many of them did, as Apple (News – Alert) sold 8.75 million iPhones last quarter and has been selling the smartphones at a clip of about 2 million a month.) But, hey, competition is good, and it’s still early days for the Android.
Android-based devices could have end up taking a firm hold of the market, or they could lose momentum over time as the early adopter market becomes saturated and customers move on to the next big thing.
Does it have the longevity of a Phil Jackson, one of the personalities in the early Android promotions, or is it more like a Jesse James, another Android hawker? Time will tell.
Edited by Patrick Barnard
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