Android popularity soars with over 500,000 activated each day

PanARMENIAN.Net - Over 500,000 Android devices are now activated each day around the world, CNET news reported citing Google's Android head Andy Rubin’s Twitter post.

Activations are growing at a rate of 4.4 percent week-over-week, the post said.

That figure becomes all the more staggering when one considers that just last month at Google's I/O Conference, the company announced that 400,000 Android devices were being activated each day, up from the 100,000 that were activated a year ago and 300,000 daily activations in December.

In 2008, between 400,000 and 500,000 units of the first Android-based smartphone, the T-Mobile G1, were expected to sell during the fourth quarter of that year.

As Android's popularity has soared, so too has its market share. According to a report released by ComScore earlier this month, Android secured 36.4 percent of the U.S. smartphone market during the first quarter of 2011, easily besting Apple's iOS platform, which controlled 26 percent of the market. RIM and Microsoft followed with 25.7 percent and 6.7 percent of the market, respectively.

On a global scale, research firm Gartner sees good times ahead for Android handsets. The research firm said in April that it expects over 630 million smartphones to hit store shelves in 2012, and Android will be running on 49.2 percent of them. Apple's iOS will come in second with 18.9 percent market share.