Official: 500,000 Android devices activated each day

This little factoid came an hour ago straight from the Android chief Andy Rubin, who tweeted:

There are now over 500,000 Android devices activated every day, and it’s growing at 4.4% w/w.

Compare that to some 210,000 daily activations for Apple stemming from the 19 million iPhones they sold in the last quarter. Google’s data point is a notable improvement over the 400,000 daily activations Google’s mobile chief Rubin reported last month at the Google I/O conference. Where are 100,000 additional devices being activated each day? Maybe China? Mobile handset base there grew to 910 million in May, a 1.08 percent and 14.35 percent sequential and annual increase, respectively. Many Android phones in China sell for less than $150, vendors like Arima Communications are promising sub-$100 handsets this summer and then there are really cheap Android knock-offs from white-label vendors.