At Google’s annual shareholder meeting yesterday, CEO Eric Schmidt indicated the company is now shipping over 65,000 Android-powered devices each and every day, with Android itself now being used on 34 mobile devices in 49 countries worldwide.
The estimate was conservative, however, with other estimates pegging the total number well above two million handsets per month, inching closer and closer to Apple, who sold 8.75M iPhones last quarter. Blackberry, however, retained the top spot with 36 percent of US smartphone sales in the quarter.
According to industry research firm NPD, US sales of smartphones running Android actually surged past those of Apple in the first quarter of the year, where it accounted for 28 percent of US consumer sales compared with 21 percent for the iPhone.
“Our strategy is very different from everybody else’s,” Schmidt said of Android. “We license our code for free, so that’s really pretty revolutionary. We’re trying to build an entire ecosystem of openness, the inverse of the other guys,” he said, without mentioning Apple by name.
