500 Million Android-powered Terminals Were Activated World Wide So Far





Google announced today trough the voice of Hugo Barra, Director of Product Management for Android, that the devices running on the search engine giant's mobile operating system have reached the 500 million activations milestone. This figure includes all the terminals running on Android that were shipped globally, with not less than 1.3 million Android devices being activated daily.

Hugo Barra also mentioned that the Jelly Bean statue that commemorates the latest OS version launched by Google, Android 4.1, was once again placed in front of the headquarters in California, along with the other statues representing the older Android versions.

The Jelly Bean statue was displayed for a while, but it was taken inside after the heat started to melt it. Meanwhile, it seems that it was reconditioned / rebuilt and now lays along side its predecessors.

According to a report from research firm IHS, quoted by CNet, the global Android terminal shipments will overtake the 1 billion units milestone in 2013. The analysts of the research firm claim that 451 million Android devices will be shipped in 2013, compared to the 357 million units shipped this year. Therefore the total number of shipped Android terminals for the 2008 - 2013 time frame should be around 1 billion units. By 2016, there should be about 3 billion activated terminals running on Google's operating system, according IHS.

On the other hand, the estimations for Android's main rival, Apple's iOS, are indicting that a total of 527 million units will be activated by 2013, reaching the 1 billion threshold in 2015.

The huge popularity of Android is mostly owed to its hardware partners with the likes of Samsung, HTC, Motorola, LG, ZTE and Huawei among them.