Google's Andy Rubin announced via Google+ that the company is now activating 700,000 Android devices every day.

"There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day," said Rubin in a post to his Google+ account Tuesday. "For those wondering we count each device only once (ie, we don't count re-sold devices), and 'activations' means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service."

It wasn't that long ago--October, to be specific--Google told us the daily activation rate was 550,000. It appears as though there's been a pretty big jump in activation numbers this fall, and the rate has doubled since April, when Google said that the rate was 350,000 daily activations.

To put the 700,000 daily activations figure into perspective, 29,000 people are buying new Android devices every hour, or 486 every minute, or 8 every second.

At this rate, Google may be activating one million Android devices each day before the middle of 2012. It is possible Google will sell 250 million Android devices in 2012. That's a lot of devices. (Keep in mind, this is a worldwide number, and isn't specific to the United States.)

Apple's iPhone remains Google's next-closest competitor, but it pales in comparison.

[ There's at least one place where Apple iOS is beating Android. See Android Lost Ground In November. ]

If we take the most recently released quarterly numbers from Apple, we know that it sold 17.07 million iPhones during its fiscal fourth quarter. Divide that by 90 days in the quarter and you get a relatively paltry 189,000 daily iPhone activations.

The big caveat here is, of course, that iPhone sales slowed down dramatically in the May-October period as people waited for Apple to announce the iPhone 5. Of course, Apple didn't announce the iPhone 5, and instead launched the iPhone 4S. iPhone sales picked up again in October once the iPhone 4S reached store shelves--but not in time to give us more reliable and up-to-date daily activation numbers.

Even so, Google is killing Apple, no question, and Apple will likely never catch back up with Android.

With Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich available on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, interest in Android will only continue to swell.

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