Eric Schmidt’s keynote at the Mobile World Congress has just covered some very promising facts. Google’s CEO has alleged that Google and Google’s hardware partners, such as HTC, are said to be shipping 60,000 Android based devices each day! As with every keynote, there is residual ambiguity. The word ‘shipped’ in this sense would traditionally mean ‘end user sales’, but given the context of hardware partners, Schmidt could very easily mean that 60,000 Android devices are ordered by retailers each day.

Either way, this is an astonishing amount, and we expect 2010 to really bring home Android as the house-hold name that it is promising to be. If we consider the rate of growth of the number of ‘shipped’  Android devices, and then scale up to cover quarterly or yearly figures, we’re likely to see well over 20 million Android based handsets sold in 2010