It’s an irrefutable fact that there’s nothing more crowd-pleasing on the Internet than mashing up otherwise mundane numbers into swanky visualisations. Be it infographics, flowcharts, or, in this case, videos, you’re bound to attract eyeballs if you can turn boring data into pretty visuals.
Now that it looks as though Google Inc. has finally managed to best Apple Inc. in the daily activations race, the boys and girls in Mountain View, Calif., have decided to celebrate with an eyeball-pleaser of their own. After the numbers war that raged between Android and iOS for a short time in the second half of last year, Android activations are now topping 300,000 a day, and, with Apple having not released any numbers for a while, it would seem they’re falling by the wayside somewhat.
To celebrate their victory Google have released their short but sweet video showing the geographic distribution of new Android handsets from October 2008 (When the G1 – the first Android handset – launched in the United States) up until the end of January. The video is interesting not just because it looks like some beautiful dystopian rave, but because it shows how much influence individual handsets had on the Android market. The Droid was when Android really took off in the United States, likewise the Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. Galaxy S causes much of Asia to explode.
Also interesting is the areas not seeing much activity – Australia, China and Russia, for instance, barely register. Asia sports five incredibly busy hot spots (Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, Tokyo and Seoul) and not much else, whereas Europe is fairly evenly spread out. It reminds us a little bit of that equally-fun Facebook friendship map we saw a while ago. Check out the video here.
