In addition to unveiling the Nexus 7 Tablet yesterday, Google also revealed that more than 400m Android devices have been activated – up from 100m a year ago; and that new Android activations are running at the rate of 12 per second, or more than 1m each day.

Google+ has attracted more than 250m users in its first year with 150m active users per month. The Google Play app store now offers more than 600,000 apps, and is seeing 1.5bn app downloads per month. 20bn apps have been installed to date. And the number of NFC-enabled Android devices now exceeds 1m.

Google also unveiled the latest version of Android, known as Jelly Bean, at the I/O Developer’s Conference yesterday. Jelly Bean promises a smoother user experience. Among the improvements are a smarter app update process in which only the elements of the app that have changed are updated, making for smaller and faster file downloads.

Jelly Bean is also NFC-friendly, offering the ability to send photos and videos to other NFC-enabled devices, via Android Beam. Notifications are more intuitive too, enabling the user to email or call directly from notifications, and also offering a smarter keyboard with next word prediction (alla SwiftKey) when composing messages.

The new OS also promises quicker and more intuitive voice searches, and introduces a feature called Google Now. It’s not entirely clear how customisable this is, but according to the Google blurb, it presents you with “just the right information at just the right time”. This includes things like weather updates, traffic information and real-time score updates for your favourite sporting teams.  
Jelly Bean will be rolled out initially to Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S devices via an Over the Air update, mid-July.