Well, we all know that the “1.5 million G1’s sold!” rumor that was making it’s rounds on blogs everywhere is fake, but the question on everyone’s mind really has got to be… what IS the actual sales number?  Mercury News sat down with HTC’s CEO, Peter Chou, last week to discuss the success of the first Google phone and got some good, albeit not exact, numbers.

“I’m saying we will ship more than 600,000” Chou had said, when asked how many G1 phones he expected to sell by the end of the year. “It will be more than what we originally planned.”

It’s nice to finally have an answer! The numbers seem to show that Android is here to stay and has been accepted as a platform that is ready to play with the big boys… paving the way for the next Google phone and implementation of Android as an OS that will keep getting better and stronger.

His answer was a little cryptic in regards to projected sales figures for 2009, preferring instead to say that they [HTC] do not disclose particular sales numbers but are confident in their competitiveness for next year. Translated: Our numbers will be high as long as word spreads about our awesome phone. I mean, it’s Google, c’mon!

As for how Mr Chou might convince potential iPhone buys to get the G1 instead? Well, we’ll let him do the talking:

“HTC products are very pragmatic and productive. We have spent a tremendous effort to make our product better. … It may not be as sexy as others. But it’s very nice, very mature and a very good experience. It has a very good quality keyboard, which makes it thicker. … It’s very good for text messaging or e-mail. .Americans are very keyboard-oriented.”

Ummm… do you think something might be missing in that statement? Like, “we have an open source platform which allows anyone to develop any kind of application at all” or maybe “Our phone is better, neener neener neener” Okay, maybe not that last part :-P

Enjoy your G1’s everyone!

Androidguys via Mercurynews