The Apple iPhone may not have any immediate contenders to its crown when it comes to the Motorola Droid or the Google Nexus phone, but as a whole, there is whole other beast that Apple needs to worry about and those are the Google Android handsets that are moving.

In fact, Android powered mobile devices are shipping at a pace of 60,000 units each and every day either by Google or Google partners. This was a sliver of information that Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt revealed in his keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

On a quarterly basis, it means that 5.4 million Android handsets are being moved which is only some 3.3 million less then the 8.7 million iPhones that shipped last quarter. When you consider how established the iPhone is in the mobile phone market and how relatively new Android handsets are, this is quite a feat and something that Apple needs to be cognisant about. You have to wonder just how long it will be before Android powered mobile devices out-ship the iPhone. One of the things that Google has on their side is the fact that their mobile OS is hardware independent whereas Apple is limited to only their own devices as their product is proprietary.

Via: Geek, Tech Crunch