Apple’s iPad may still be sitting pretty at the top of the consumer tablet charts, but questions still stay over whether or not Android 3.x Honeycomb really has been a sales failure so far. Google and its manufacturer partners are yet to announce official sales figures for tablets running Android, leaving us dependent on supply chain rumors as well as guesstimates. Android developer Al Sutton reminded us, though, that with a small math we can get an estimate of quite how many Honeycomb slates are in the wild. The amount? Roughly 3.4m.

That’s based on Google’s latest platform version stats - the fortnightly changed breakdown of exactly what proportion of devices use each Android version - and the official activation numbers announced as part of the search giant’s financial results yesterday. Then, Google CEO Larry Page said 190m Android devices had been activated in total.

According to the platform stats, 1.8-percent of Android devices that have accessed the Android Marketplace inside the 14 day period up to October 3 2011 have been running Android 3.0, 3.1 or perhaps 3.2 (in contrast, 38.2-percent are running 2.3.3 Gingerbread or higher). Bashing those stats together gets we the 3.4m tablet figure.

Now, it’s worth noting that, because Google’s platform numbers are based on access to the Android Market, only those tablets that are Google certified - i.e. meet all of the company s criteria to include the official download store - are being counted. There are certainly more tablets available running alternative versions of Android as well as using third-party app stores, such as Amazon’s AppStore for Android, as well as they won’t be included in the total.

Nonetheless, it’s a disappointing figure compared to Apple’s iPad sales. The first-gen iPad sold 15m units in approximately a year, anything it seems all of the Android OEMs combined can’t challenge with Honeycomb.


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