Android Juggernaut Marches OnAndroid Juggernaut Marches On

The new Verizon Droid X by Motorola has sold out in many places the first day it was for sale, including on Verizon's site. It is the latest phone with Google's platform that is driving over one million activations each week.Verizon has made a major bet on Android and it seems to be paying off. They kicked it off with the Droid last year. They have had the HTC Droid Incredible, now the Droid X and the Droid 2 is in the works. Even without the iPhone, Verizon is enjoying some major league success in the smartphone market right now.

If you want a Droid X, Verizon is saying that it should be available again by July 23.

Verizon's success coupled with all of the other Android devices on carriers around the world is driving 160,000 activations per day according to Jonathan Rosenberg, Sr. Vice President of Product Management at Google. That is nearly triple the rate of 65,000 units last quarter.

Of course, Google doesn't make a dime directly from all of these device sales since there are no licensing costs. Google makes its money off of advertising and Android search is up 300% in the first half of 2010.

Google is in a unique position with their advertising model. The entire company is built on advertising around web searching. They built a search engine to facilitate that on your PC and the platform necessary to do that on your mobile phone. While Apple may generate some revenue with iAd and Microsoft with Bing, both are small potatoes in their overall business model.

Right now, I doubt if Android searching is a material source of revenue for the search giant, but mobile searching is really in its infancy. I can easily see a day where searching on a high powered smartphone or tablet matches the number of search requests on a PC. Google is setting itself up to profit big from that market.