The Android platform is on fire. Phones based on the Google operating system are being activated at a rate of 200,000 per day – and have eclipsed Apple iOS sales. Google CEO Eric Schmidt points to the Verizon Droid X for the rapid rise.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday night at the Techonomy Conference, Schmidt said the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant still has a soft spot for its rival iPhone.
“I should also say we love the success of the iPhone, because the iPhone also uses Google search and we get a good chunk of that revenue when people search on the iPhone. The iPhone, followed by Android, brought about these WebKit-centric browsers that are sufficiently powerful that you can do real mobile computing,” Schmidt is quoted by GigaOm.
Figuring Google sells 18 million Android devices each quarter, adding all iOS devices (9.41 million iPods, 8.4 million iPhones, 3.27 million iPads), “you struggle to reach that 18 million,” Fortune‘s Seth Weintraub writes.
[Fortune]
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
