Samsung said this week it has shipped more than 1 million Galaxy S smartphones in the U.S., roughly six weeks after they were put on sale along side the iPhone 4 at AT&T and to T-Mobile subscribers.

Though they aren't iPhone 4 or iPad uptake numbers, sales of Samsung's Android-based phone does give the Android camp a hot-selling model to go head-to-head against Apple, and Research in Motion, which has seen lackluster sales of its new BlackBerry Torch, the first model sporting the new BlackBerry OS 6. Android's momentum has been well documented, most recently by Gartner when it reported that smartphone makers had shipped 11.2 million Android-based devices in the second quarter, or 17.2 percent of the worldwide market, up from a mere 1.8 percent in the second quarter of 2009. Yet much of Android's success has been attributed to the fact that there are dozens of makers and models of Android phones, offered by all the major wireless carriers, while the iPhone remains exclusively on AT&T in the U.S. and RIM is the sole supplier of the Blackberry.