Android device activations hit 3.7 million on Christmas weekend - CNET

Google and its Android partners had a lot to cheer about this Christmas.

In a tweet touting the holiday numbers, Google's Android honcho Andy Rubin said 3.7 million Android devices were activated the weekend of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

As Rubin explained in a Google+ post last week, activations refer strictly to the number of new devices (not resold ones) that Google records subscribing to a mobile service.

This news--directly from the mouth of Google--follows yesterday's report from Flurry that Apple iOS and Android devices combined recorded 6.8 million activations on Christmas Day alone. That was a healthy leap from the 2.8 million seen last Christmas.

Flurry didn't break down the numbers per platform, but using some rough extrapolating, the folks at Engadget came up with a fairly even split between the two.

A study out yesterday from Localytics also discovered a huge surge in holiday activations for both IOS and Android, particularly from the U.K., the U.S., and Canada.

The jump in Android activations can be followed just by reading Rubin's tweets over the past year. On December 20, the Google exec tweeted that more than 700,000 devices were being activated each day, up from 500,000 devices in late June and 300,000 in December of 2010.