Google CEO talks up Mobile potential

Google CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday to talk up to Android OS for tablets and phones, in addition to giving nods Chrome, search and YouTube.

Schmidt said that there are 300,000 devices Android enabled daily and 150,000 apps in the Android app store--a number that has tripled in the last nine months. Developers now start with mobile applications because that is where the growth is, he added, saying that sales of smartphones exceeded sales of PC last quarter.

There are a number of trends at work, Schmidt said: cloud computing, that was present for a long period; the fact that the devices are packing in more and more power; and the fact that the networks are increasingly powerful. About 98 percent of mobile phone operators offer speed of megabytes per second, he said. What is important to LTE, the latest technology for mobile broadband, you will create the opportunity for another set of applications that we can only imagine, Schmidt said.

One of these new applications Android demonstrated by a Google employee on stage is Movie Studio, an application built for tablets that allows users to edit videos. The demo showed how a user can drag a title to an image and also reorder items in the timeline of the video by dragging and dropping. You can also add a pan and zoom effect, and by pinching two fingers can zoom video in photo.

Schmidt said that the growing penetration of mobile phones offers hope to communicate with people around the world that are currently not connected online and solve some of the world's biggest problems, including terrorism and global warming.

Refer to competitor Google in the browser war, Schmidt said that there are 120 million active users of chrome.

Meanwhile, the YouTube video site of the company remains a force to be reckoned with: Schmidt said that 35 hours of video is uploaded every minute for the site. Its revenue doubled in 2010, he said, and Google is monetizing the professional content.

Schmidt has refused to be drawn on a question from the audience on Android fragmentation, a concern for some developers.