Obviously Android is growing, but this rhetorical trick to make the growth look RIDICULOUS is... ridiculous.

I'm not sure why this analysis stopped in October 2009. Why not go back to October 2008? Then the stats would look something like this:

  all other phones:
    sales in October 2008: finite
    sales in Jan 2010: larger
    percentage increase: big

  Android phones:
    sales in October 2008: zero
    sales in Jan 2010: large
    percentage increase: INFINITY!!!

In other words, I assert that one big reason why Android has grown so fast since "the three month period ending in October 2009" is that before then there was only one or two Android phones, they were all from HTC, as I remember they were rather poorly marketed, and as a result they sold modestly but not spectacularly. When you're down that far, there's a lot of upside potential.

Take a look at this chart:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Android_devices

What you will see is that the bulk of Android-powered devices, including the ones with the big popularity and big press from Motorola and (of course) Google itself, all came out after October 2009.

Cherry-picking certain parts of the sales growth curve and then extrapolating them to infinity does not add additional information. Take the data for what it is: The newest Android-powered devices are selling much, much better than the old; Apple's three-year-old iPhone platform has reached a marketshare plateau (not astonishing: three years is a long time in the phone market; unlike Android the iPhone OS is only available on a few types of device from one vendor; and in many markets the iPhone is chained firmly to specific telecom vendors, as Bay Area AT&T customers know all too well). Meanwhile, it sure is nice to be RIM, Microsoft's marketshare is doing about what everyone expected, and, well, it's really too bad about Palm.

EDIT: Oh, wait, these are smartphone subscriber stats. As such they probably don't include Apple's iPod Touch or other non-phone devices. (e.g. Does the Nook count?) When judging the installed base of the software platforms, rather than the size of various markets for cellphone minutes, this is a big omission, since Apple is known to do a huge iPod Touch business.