Google has taken a dig at Apple"s iPhone, saying the device has a much smaller market than phones which run Android, the mobile phone operating system Google helped develop.
The search giant said that despite selling 4 million units within the first 7 months of its release, the iPhone was ultimately a more limited device than phones which ran on the Google-backed platform, because the potential for developers to build new applications using Android was greater.
Rich Miner, group manager for mobile platforms at Google, was quoted by IT Week as saying: "Once you have devices out there from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and so on, there"s a much larger potential market on Android than for the iPhone."
Mr Miner told a conference in Silicon Valley that whereas the iPhone had "a single manufacturer" and was "targeted at a particular demographic", developers could expect a much wider uptake of applications they developed for Android-based phones, the first of which are expected to be released later this year.