French website Mobinaute reports that Orange France plans to launch at least six Android handsets this year from five manufacturers: Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Samsung and HTC. The report notes that Orange declared itself happy with the revenue-sharing model of Android’s application store, Android Market, and will heavily promote it. Developers of Android Market applications receive a 70 percent cut of revenue from sold applications, whilst the remaining 30 percent is shared between Android’s owner, Google, and the operators.

All the world’s major handset vendors – with the exception of Nokia – are supporting development of Android-powered handsets. On the operator side, 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. Speculation surrounding Orange’s plans therefore points to growing tier-one operator support for the operating system. At present Android remains only a very minor player in the operating systems space – controlling less than 2 percent – but this looks set to change before the end of this year.