My colleague Narek Karapetyan blogged recently about Google's Android mobile operating system, suggesting the business model and development platform was more inviting to developers wanting to build mobile applications.

I remember reading it thinking "anything with such widespread developer, or geek, following, is bound to succeed in our industry".

This week, Nielsen has released data revealing that Google Android-powered mobile phones have outsold iPhones and Blackberrys in the United States of America over the last 6 months.

Importantly, the period in which this data was collected included a full month of Apple's release of its latest iPhone offering - iPhone 4.

The Nielsen report says:

Among all smartphone owners, Blackberry still holds the dominant share with 31 percent of the market, though its lead over Apple is declining. Twenty-eight percent of smartphone owners have Apple iPhones, compared to 19 percent who have Android devices.

I would like to come back to my point earlier and tie it in to Google's business model with the Android operating system.

If you win over the developer, or geek, community with your tech product, you are onto a winner.

Google made Android open to developers to build apps and easily make them available to potential or paying users. Critically, this came at a time when iPhone was taking record periods to approve iPhone applications as developers hung around for their good work to go live.

Blackberry owner RIM (Research In Motion) has even further restrictions on developers, and as a result, its app collection is the smallest of the Smartphone operating system giants.

Other than pleasing the geeks, Android does have other commercial benefits that iPhone and Blackberry do not.

Its 'open' policy extends to phone manufacturers to make phones with its intelligent operating system, with more apps than these hardware companies would ever imagine offering their consumers with their minimalist operating systems.

Motorola, HTC and Samsung are among the major phone manufacturers to adopt Android and as a result.

This 'open' model has Google on an upward trend with Android. It knows it is on a winner.