Google’s Android 1.5  is facing a tough competition in catching up with iPhone 3.0 in US, but not everywhere else. China absolutely is Google’s biggest hope.

China’s mobile released its version of mobile operation sytem recently, which is based on Google’s Android platform. With more than 400M subscribers, China Mobile failed to made agreement with Apple for its iPhone. As the result, China Mobile might be the largest operator for Android soon.

Besides OMS, several manufactors had reported plans to release Anroid based phone in China, of cause, not only for China Mobile. This makes China the biggest potential market for Android and most likely will not face the same level of competition it faced in US with Apple.

With a large resources pool of expereinces Java developers,  Android platform is far more popular than iPhone in the development communities.  Not only that, the Chinese operators and government all like the open source nature of the platform, so they can take over the control. I met lots of developers who are excited with Android development while I was in China one month ago. All of them were Java developers.

  Break down of subscriber data in Jan (sohu.com)