Fresh on the heels of last weeks announcement by North Americas largest carrier, Verizon, to jointly develop Android handsets, the worlds largest carrier by subscriber, China Mobile, further boosted the little green guys mobile presence when Motorola announced it plans to release 8 OPhone handsets for them. The OPhone is the Android variant developed by China Mobile for their market - it includes the necessary localisation and network support to operate.

There have been hurdles in the past regarding Chinas 3G adoption - basically, they did not want to pay the west the licensing fees and so developed their own system, termed TD-SCDMA, with the rest of the world using W-CDMA. In fact this made them relatively late to the party - the licenses were only issued in Jan 2009 - and in the end were for both TD-SCDMA and W-CDMA. These networks are frantically being rolled out now in anticipation of the demand for supporting handsets, so the China Mobile/Motorola announcement is very timely indeed.

Motorola are not the only manufacturer to develop handsets with the OPhone stack - Dell made a similar announcement earlier in the year. Lenovo too have been working with it for some time. It's only with the release if the OPhone SDK though, that developers wanting to target this platform were really able to get going. In fact the O in OPhone stands for "Open"

China Mobile says that more than 10 handset manufacturers are participating with the OPhone including Lenovo, Dell, Dopod(HTC), Samsung, Motorola, LG, Amoi, Philips and Hisense.

With such a huge market Motorola will not want to miss this opportunity. As CEO Sanjay Jha said recently, "“We will deliver the vast majority of our devices in 2010 on Android”. Looks like he ain't kidding...