Timely reality check on Android devices and Google’s increasing prowess in the Mobile space.

Google is approaching a quarter million Android activations/day

In an excellent story on the Android Invasion, Newsweek's Dan Lyons get's some new activation numbers from Android Chief, Andy Rubin. Rubin says that Google has recently passed the 250,000 activations/day mark, though only once, yet the numbers continue to rise overall.

That rate is 1 million every four days, just under 8 million a month and close to 100 million activations/year. Will Google have sold 100 million more Android handsets by this time next year? It seems pretty likely.

Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt announced that they were activating 200,000 devices/day just two months ago at the Techonomy conference in Aspen. That's up from 100,000/day in May at Google I/O and 160,000/day announced at Google's June earnings conference.

Wow.

The numbers have even baffled rival CEOs like Apple's (AAPL) Steve Jobs. Jobs said there must be something wrong with the numbers at a recent Apple event, "we think our friends are counting upgrades". At the same time, he announced Apple was activating 230,000 iOS devices/day. Google retorted saying, "The Android activation numbers do not include upgrades and are, in fact, only a portion of the Android devices in the market since we only include devices that have Google services."