Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, now Chairman, was interviewed yesterday in New York at the AllThingsD Dive Into Mobile conference. He talked a lot about Android and the mobile industry in general, but it’s the new data points he dropped that are most interesting.
He says Android devices are now being activated at a rate of 1.5 million a day. If you do the math, that’s 1 billion devices every 22 months. Speaking about the b-word, Eric says that in “six to nine months” there will be over 1 billion Android devices in use.
His most famous comment, meaning the one that’s most being circulated around the internet, is that Motorola is currently working on handsets that can be thought of as “phones plus”. First there were phones, then there smartphones, superphones, and now there’s this newfangled term.
Thanks, Eric.
When will we see these new Motorola phones? In a separate interview with Jim Wicks, Motorola’s Chief of Design, he says that Motorola will announce “Google influenced” devices by the end of this year. They’ll run stock Android and will be “just right” when it comes to size.
