Half a billion Android devices have been activated

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google has now activated half a billion devicesrunning the Android mobile operating system.

The firm made the announcement on the day that Apple will announce the latest entry into its Iphone family, with Android product manager Hugo Barra saying that this is a "big day" for the little robot.

"Today is a big day for Android," he said in a post to Google+. "500 million devices activated globally, and over 1.3 million added every single day."

The number of Google Android activations has been slowly creeping up. In July 2011 Google was boasting of 550,000 activations per day, while by February it was talking about 850,000 a day.

In June the number had crept up to 900,000. Since then, of course, Google has seen its mobile operating system appear on the Asus Nexus 7 tablet computer, which might have driven up user activations.

Activations have been clarified by the firm as being phones or tablets that are turned on for the first time. This means that Google does not count existing devices that have been resold. µ