Android to Have a Great Year, Google CEO Says

When it comes to the number of mobile phones featuring Google's Android operating system that will be released on the market this year, the counting goes high on the two-figure numbers, and other types of devices sporting the platform are expected to surface as well. Not only analysts and market watchers say that the OS tends to become highly popular; Google is aware of it too.

According to the latest news on the web, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated on Thursday that the ongoing year would be a great one for Android. “Overall, it looks like Android is going to have a very strong year,” is what he said during the company's first quarter investors' conference, also adding that the company would make “quite significant” new announcements of Android-related products, as well as new partnerships with mobile service providers and device makers.

Some of the manufacturers that are interested in Google's mobile operating system come from the personal computer area, where the platform is expected to surface in different types of devices, such as netbooks, low-power laptops that have seen a lot of traction in the past several months, or other Internet-enabled products, though Eric Schmidt says that Google wouldn't be involved in this.

As many of you might already know, the first mobile phone to sport the Android OS was the HTC Dream, launched on the market by T-Mobile as G1, which is expected to be followed by a large number of other handsets, coming both from the Taiwanese maker HTC and from other industry players. Previously, a number of more than 40 Android-based mobile phones were forecast for the ongoing year, but we might see even more such handsets released.

When it comes to more devices that would run Android, we can only think of the set boxes that are expected to be showcased this fall in Japan, not to mention different netbooks that might include it as well, such as the Eee PC netbook Taiwan's Asustek Computer is rumored to be working on. Basically, the OS seems to have seen enough traction from users to determine some voices to state that it could prove a competitor against Microsoft's Windows XP, which can be currently found on netbooks.