Happy birthday Android! It’s hard to believe, but Google’s mobile OS is a year old today, and we’ve got the facts and figures showing what impact it’s made right here.
Precisely a year ago today, Google launched Android by making it open source and available to all. The first Android phone, HTC’s T-Mobile G1, launched a week later, and while it took the best part of 10 months for other companies to chime in with their efforts, the Android revolution is now well and truly underway with Samsung, Huawei and Motorola all selling Google blowers, and LG and Sony Ericsson hurriedly preparing their offerings.
Read our HTC Tattoo review now
Mobile advertising platform AdMob’s got the stats on the first 365 days of Android, and they’re impressive: it now commands 7% of the smartphone market worldwide and 10% in the UK, no mean feat when you think of all the BlackBerrys, Nokia S60 handsets and iPhones out there.
The G1 is also the second most popular smartphone for surfing online, after the iPhone, and although the Android Market is still playing catch up to the iPhone App Store in hard sales, it’s getting close in relative popularity: AdMob’s survey found that Android users download 9.1 apps a month, compared to 10.2 for iPhone obsessives.
And for the next year? Expect plenty more Android phones to come, as well as everything from Android e-readers to netbooks and PMPs, as well as the promising 2.0 update.
Out TBC | £TBC | Android
