We’re in Barcelona keeping an eye on Eric Schmidt’s Mobile World Congress keynote, where the Google CEO just disclosed an interesting fact: Google and their hardware partners are now shipping 60,000 Android handsets each day.

Whether “shipped” here means “sold to end users” or “ordered by retailers” is unclear – but regardless, it’s quite the feat either way.

If that’s a true average rate and it holds true for the next year, that works out to about 5.4 million handsets per quarter, or 21.9 million per year. Not only that, but the rate seems to be growing fairly rapidly; according to Schmidt, the rate has nearly doubled over the last quarter.

Solely as a point of reference for the curious: Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter.