A couple of years back you’d have been forgiven for thinking that nobody could realistically give the iPhone a run for its money in the Smartphone market. But the days of the iPhone’s overwhelming dominance in this field might well be numbered as Google CEO, Eric Schmidt announced that 60,000 Android handsets are being sold every single day.

Impressive numbers that confirm what we already knew – Apple have a real competitor. At the rate of 60,000 a day that would mean that 5.4 million Android handsets would sell each quarter. That’s still shy of the 8.7 million iPhones sold last quarter but nonetheless opens the market up.

Schmidt was also keen to let the world know that Android now boasts an impressive 30,000 apps in its store. Fair enough, this isn’t quite the 140,000 that Apple had as of January this year, but it’s a sharp rise in a short space of time and hints that there’s a lot more to come.  The Android app store has no moderation of its apps, which speeds up the submission process for developers looking to submit. However, critics complain that this means a lower overall quality of apps than you might find in the Apple store.

Whatever the next moves in the Smartphone market, increased competition can only be good news for the consumers.