• TechCrunch, Friday, October 16, 2009 3:16 PM

Perhaps fired up by Google's strong third-quarter earnings, CEO Eric Schmidt was particularly confident about the company's mobile future on Thursday. "Android adoption is about to explode," he claimed during an earnings call, as all the "necessary conditions" are set for growth.

Indeed, there are now 12 Android phones on the market across 32 carriers in 26 countries. The Android strategy is to offer a low-cost, fully-featured, open-source OS to cell phone manufacturers -- so they can concentrate on hardware -- and thus corner the nascent mobile search market. In the second quarter, mobile searches on Google were up 30%, according to the company.

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