Andy Rubin, the VP in charge of the mobile segment at Google, announced that 160,000 Android smartphones are being activated everyday and that's an increase of 60 per cent compared to May when that figure was pegged at 100,000.

Back in February, that number was only 60,000 and half that a year earlier. This now means that, at this current rate, Google and its partners will be able to sell around five million phones a month or 60 million per year. In other words, by the end of 2010, there could well be more Android phones around than iPhones.

The announcement came as Google celebrated having more than 60 Android devices across the world manufactured by a network of 21 OEMs and delivered to 59 carriers in 49 countries. This, Google said, exceeded their most optimistic expectations.

Launched less than two years ago, Google's Android platform has managed a few technological firsts over the last few months after a laborious start with its initial partner, HTC. Before Apple, Android handsets introduced an 8-megapixel camera, noise cancellation, a 1GHz processor and some nifty features like multitasking.

As a sidenote, Rubin has also announced that Google was open sourcing Android OS 2.2 otherwise known as Froyo or Frozen Yoghurt, which means that a number of manufacturers are likely to introduce new models or update existing ones to Android OS 2.2, at an accelerating rate, over the next few months.