The rollout of LTE networks and new cloud based services this year will mark the start of a new era for mobile innovation. This was said with optimism by the Chief Executive Officer of  Google,  Eric Schmidt during his speech at the ongoing MWC  ending today in Barcelona, Spain.

LTE will provide the platform for a set of new mobile applications that we can only begin to imagine,” said Schmidt in a special keynote session at Congress to the participants.

While positioning  Google’s own Android OS  at the forefront of this change, he  said that Android phone activations are  now running at more than 300,000 a day with 170 Android-based handsets currently available from 27 device vendors – making it the “world’s fastest-growing mobile platform”

He claimed that such scale made Android a compelling prospect for developers. ”Developers think ‘mobile first’ because they know this is where there is scale and growth; they also go where the money is.” he said .

As well as benefiting from Google’s advertising businesses, developers can also tap into YouTube – which Schmidt said was now experiencing 35 hours of video uploads every minute. There are now 150,000 apps on the Android store, said Schmidt, a tally that has tripled in the last nine months.

However, he was forced to defend suggestions that Android represented a fragmented apps environment for developers to work on, claiming that Google enforces so-called “anti-fragmentation laws” for vendors licensing the platform.

Google engineer joined Schmidt on stage to demonstrate the forthcoming “Honeycomb” Android version (3.0) running on a Motorola XOOM tablet.

Google showed off a new Android app called ‘Movie Studio,’ which allows users to record, edit and distribute movies directly from a tablet.

Schmidt said little on the recent Nokia/Microsoft deal that is aiming to become a major challenger to Android, except for a brief acknowledgement of regret that Nokia had opted to go with Google’s greatest rival. “We would have loved Nokia to have chosen Android and our offer remains open.”