Schmidt: 200,000 Android Devices Are Sold Every Day
Google’s Eric Schmidt is back with more music to our Android-loving ears as he’s confirmed that Android’s now seeing an activation rate of 200,000 per day. The last figure we’d gotten was back in May when Google and some 5,000-odd developers convened on the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco for their developer conference, IO. Back then, 160,000 was the ballpark figure.
Since nearly 2 months ago, that’s a 25% increase in activations. It wasn’t long ago that we’d entered 2010 and the Nexus One, HTC Desire, and Motorola Droid were the three phones that pretty much defined the Android experience. There were two problems, though: the Motorola Droid was only on one carrier (albeit a fairly large one) and the Nexus One wasn’t being marketed to sell. Desire did well for itself, but it had no penetration in the US market (yes, I know: everything’s not about us yanks.)
Since then, though, smartphone manufacturers have gone completely bonkers with introducing new smartphones each and every day ranging from entry level cheap phones to high-end mammoths. Different form factors, screen sizes, add-on features (QWERTY, front-facing camera, HDMI) drove user choice as we’ve seen dozens – if not nearing hundreds – of phones released for the world’s wireless “talkbox” providers to date.
Let’s throw out a large number and run with it, just for entertainment purposes. If – for the next 365 days – 200,000 Android handsets continued to be activated each day, that’s 73,000,000 Android phones per year. While I’m sure that daily activation rate fluctuates (and since no one really knows what Google considers an activation, we can’t determine if the number equates to devices sold), it sounds pretty damning for other phones running other operating systems (no, I’m not going to mention them in this gloat-post).
All I can say at this point is I can’t wait for Q3 to be up. With even more superphones launching, a tablet market getting ready to take off, and a hand basket full of other unique Android phones coming to town by every major manufacturer, I’ll be front and center to see how Android’s doing against the competition in three months’ time.
[Wishful Thinking image courtesy of Rustic Ranch Tack. Chart courtesy of Unwired View]