On May 10th at the 2011 Google I/O conference, the search engine company announced that they were activating over 400,000 Android devices every single day. Today, via a tweet from Andy Rubin, the father of Android, pictured above wearing glasses, we now know that number is up to 500,000 per day, and more importantly it’s growing at a rate of 4.4% per week. Using some basic maths (500,000 x 1.044 and counting the number of times we hit the equal button on our calculator until it shows a number over 1 million, then adding that number to 26, the current week of the year we’re in) we’ve tabulated that by the end of October the number of Android devices being activated per day should equal just over 1 million. To put that number into some perspective, the first device to ship with Android, the HTC Dream (or G1 as it’s better known), shipped in October 2008.
We’re looking forward to seeing what future Android devices are going to come out during the second half of this year, hopefully more hardware packing near field communication (NFC) technology. Then in 2012 we’ll have to be wearing bibs when using our computers as we’ll no doubt be drooling over the quad core beasts that are going to be hitting the scene, likely with the added ability of recording video in 1080p. Besides the high end superphones, we’re also looking forward to seeing what type of device you’ll be able to get for less than $200. Today that buys you something with a 2.8 inch 240 x 320 pixel resolution screen, WiFi, GPS, and 3G, all running on a slow-ish processor. In 2012 we want to see 800 x 480 screens, Snapdragon processors, and possibly even HSPA+ access come to budget handsets. It’ll happen, it’s just a matter of when.
Anyway, how many of those 500,000 Android per day do you think are Honeycomb tablets? Five, six, nine? No seriously, ten?