Google Touts 500 Million Android Activations

Before Apple regales us with the details of its new handset, the iPhone 5, Google wants to talk all about 500 million. That's the number of activated devices running Google's mobile operating system, Android. That number is increasing strongly, with 1.3 million smartphones and tablets activated every single day.

A large part of this impressive growth is due to Android and Apple's shared domination of the global smartphone market. The two operating software behemoths accounted for 85% of all devices (statistics recorded in August), with Android accounting for a total of 68.1%.

Of the 500 million devices, the majority of them are running on the older versions of Android's OS. It's currently estimated that about 58% of these devices run on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), with just over 20% running on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and only 1.2% running on Google's new Android 4.1 (JellyBean).

However, we can expect to see these numbers to change as Android 4.1 is slowly starting to be offered on new devices, such as the Motorola Xoom and many older devices will be offering upgrades in the future such as the Samsung Galaxy S III.