I think it is a good thing to use competitors products, it lets you know what they are doing well, and where you can improve/compete.

I highly doubt a blackberry is his only phone, I suspect he's got an iPhone, a WP7, maybe even a WebOS phone hanging around.

Isn't it an amazing interesting coincidence that everybody's personal preference for phone almost always happens to be the same one they get paid to work on?

Seriously, just because you work on something, doesn't mean you have to pretend you're the target market.

There is some value in dogfooding. Perhaps he might be better able to envision and guide the Android teams if he were using one every day. What Android is doing right/wrong may be easier to tell when he has one rather than sifting through customer feedback.

Besides all this are the PR/consumer confidence aspects of this, which I think a company is responsible for managing. To some degree, your success in business depends on what the public perceives of you.

It's not much of a surprise. Schmidt has been on record before saying he enjoys his Blackberry and has a preference for a physical keyboard.

Maybe because he does not need to play angry birds while waiting in line somewhere, whatever.

If anyone is to make any conclusion from this about android, well, i have nothing good to say.

This could have been pre-android days

it was taken this week.