With Magic around the corner and Samsung looking to ship an Android device within the next few months, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is confident that the open source phone OS can and will counteract Google's fourth-quarter fiscal downturn - the first quarterly decline since it went public.

Despite Sony Ericsson and Motorola's timidity towards the 'Droid, Schmidt declares '09 the year of the robot:

"There are announcements happening between now and the end of the year that are quite significant from operators and new hardware partners in the Android space, which I won't pre-announce except to say that they really do fulfil much of the vision that we laid out more than a year ago."

Without Nokia or LG support, that leaves Samsung in the top-five mobile OEMs to stop the show. The long-suspected adoption of Android for other products, such as media players and netbooks is also part of the plan, and underway in Asia. But to what extent we will see that unfold stateside by the end of the year, well... your guess is as good as mine.

Via 4GTRENDS