The adoption of Google Android continues to gain pace. According to the company, each day over half of a million Google Android-based devices are activated worldwide. Given that the vast majority of them are smartphones, it is easy to guess that the operating system will be the No. 1 OS for smartphones in Q2 2011.

"There are now over 500 thousand Android devices activated every day, and it is growing at 4.4% [weekly]," said Andy Rubin, the vice president of engineering at Google, in his micro-blog.

Approximately 300 thousand Android-powered gadgets were activated daily in December and as sales of tablets and smartphones began to more grow this year, that number increased to 400 thousand a day.

Historically, Nokia sold around 300 thousand Symbian-based smartphones daily and was by far ahead of Apple iPhone or anything based on Google Android. With the dropping popularity of Symbian, it is clear that Google Android will be the most popular smartphone operating system in the second quarter of this year. Apple iOS can become the No. 2 operating system for advanced handsets provided that sales of iPhone have been growing in Q2 2011.

The worldwide smartphone market is forecast to grow 55% year over year in 2011 as a growing number of users turn in their feature phones for more advanced devices. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), vendors will ship a total of 472 million smartphones in 2011 compared to roughly 305 million units shipped in 2010. That figure will nearly double to 982 million by the end of 2015.

Tags: Google, Android, Symbian, iOS, iPhone, Nokia