BARCELONA— Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt today delivered his keynote at Mobile World Congress (MWC) and answered questions after his prepared remarks, and the tone was definitely less confrontational than it was last year – on both sides of the stage.

Schmidt talked about the power of technology and the importance of computers and smartphones to make people’s lives easier so they have more time to do the things they really want to do. But it was during the question and answer session when he took on some of the topics that are top of mind for many Google watchers, including one question about the Googler who helped people connect in Egypt (Google is proud of him) and why Google co-founder Larry Page was not here instead of Schmidt.

To the question about Page, who will assume the CEO role in April, Schmidt made it pretty clear that Page likes his internal role at Google and was happy to remain at his own home or office rather than traveling to Barcelona. When the announcement was made that Schmidt would leave the CEO post and take on more of an advisory role, it was understood that Schmidt would do a lot of the external kinds of things.

As for Twitter and rumors that Google is interested in buying it, he said nothing about that, in response to a question, beyond “we love Twitter and I love to tweet.”

Google has been running a time clock at the Android pavilion showing the fast pace of Android activations worldwide and that clock was represented on stage before Schmidt came out. He explained that what the audience was seeing was a short history and a fast history of Android, which is now supported by 27 OEMs and has so far generated 170 Android compatible devices.

While he used to hold a different view, he said he now believes technology is going to serve humans and not the other way around. People want to have more fulfilled lives, spending time with friends and family, and computers can take over on the more mundane tasks and remember things that it’s impossible for people to remember, like hotels that you’ve stayed at and the pictures you took during that trip.

He introduced a demo that showed how a Nexus S can take photos and record video that gets uploaded to Picasa, then a different form factor is used – in the case of the demo, the Motorola Xoom with Honeycomb tablet, to edit using a new Movie Studio Android app. That produced a high quality video about historic Barcelona that was uploaded to YouTube. Schmidt also noted that YouTube is averaging 160 million mobile views per day, and its revenue doubled in 2010.

Google’s primary competitor is Microsoft, which he said has a good product called Bing, but in some cases it might be a little too good – a comment that got some laughs from the audience in light of accusations about Bing taking a page or two from Google’s search expertise. As for the situation with Facebook, he said Facebook is probably zero to net positive – it seems to be Facebook users use Google more, but it’s clear that Microsoft will remain its core competitor for a long time.

Regarding Nokia joining forces with Microsoft on Windows Phone 7, he said Google would have loved for Nokia to have chosen Android, but Nokia chose the competition, and “we’re sorry” that they made that choice. “We certainly tried,” he said, and the door’s still open if Nokia should decide to develop phones for Android.

Schmidt took a host of questions and was generous with his time, wrapping it up only after getting a nudge from the host.

He was asked how he sees Google and MWC in 10 years. He said he’s sure Mobile World Congress will be bigger, and Google will be bigger as well. Mobile technology likely won’t get swapped for something else, but in 10 years the “wows” will probably be in the area of artificial intelligence on top of that.