Let's use the power of math and calculate how many Android tablets got sold so far-- crunch the latest Android platform stats with the official activation numbers from the Google Q3 2011 financial results. The total should come to... around 3.42 million.
The calculation comes through the Twitter account of Android developer Al Sutton.
However Google's Andy Rubin disagrees-- at his opening keynote to the first AsiaD conference Rubin says there are "a little more than 6 million Android tablets out there running Google services," a total not counting other tablets.
What's the working behind the previous result? Google claims Android device activations total 190M. The platform stats show 1.8% of Android devices accessing the Android Market on the 14 day period to October 3 2011 used the tablet-only Android 3.x. Simple division does the rest.
However, one has to keep in mind these numbers only count officially activated devices-- there are certainly more tablets out there running on other Android versions and using 3rd party app stores, which would make a difference (if probably not by much).
Now we can only wonder how the forthcoming Android-based (but not Android Market using) Amazon Kindle Fire will affect such totals. Meanwhile, Apple claims it sold 15M iPads in a year...
Go Al Sutton's calculation on Twitter