At the official unveiling of Verizon's new Droid X device - manufactured by Motorola and using the Android OS - Google's veep of engineering Andy Rubin updated media about the company's daily activation count.

Back in April, it was 60,000. This jumped to 100,000 in May, and now is revealed as 160,000 per day.

These are spread across 60 devices, from 21 OEMs and operated by 59 carriers in 49 countries.

Speeding up

Partly this is due to heavy summer discounting in the US where both Verizon and T-Mobile are running buy one, get one free promotions on certain Android devices.

Equally, new launches such as Sprint's EVO 4G and Samsung's Galaxy S are also driving volumes. EVO 4G was Sprint's fastest selling launch ever. 

If sales remain at this level, the monthly total for the OS would be around 5 million, or approaching 60 million devices per year.

According to estimates from research firm ISuppli Corp, this would account for around a quarter of the 247 million smartphones predicted to be sold during 2010.

[source: Google blog]