Orange France to launch six Androids

The French website Mobinaute reports Orange France plans to launch at least six Android handsets this year from five manufacturers: Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Samsung and HTC.

The report said Orange is happy with the revenue-sharing model of Android's application store, Android Market, and will promote it heavily.

Developers of Android Market applications receive a 70% cut of revenue from applications. The remaining 30% is shared between Android's owner, Google, and the operators.

All the world's major handset vendors, except Nokia and Apple, are supporting the development of Android-powered handsets.

T-Mobile was the first operator to offer Android handsets, launching HTC's G1 device last October. Vodafone will launch the second Android device, HTC's Magic, next month.

The website said it appears that there is growing support for Android among the Tier 1 operators: at the moment Android has less than 2% marketing share of operating systems.