Android 4.1 and 4.2 each up 50 percent over last month’s tallies

The latest numbers are in, and things are continuing to move in the right direction: The “Jelly Bean” version of Android — that’s Android 4.1 and 4.2 — is now on 10.2 percent of all active devices, as of the two weeks ending Jan. 3. For the two weeks ending Dec. 3, 2012, Jelly Bean was on 6.7 percent of all active devices. Ice Cream Sandwich numbers were up slightly as well, from 27.5 percent to 29.1 percent. Devices on Android 2.3 Gingerbread are trending down, from 50.8 percent last month to 47.6 percent today.

Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” is making gains, though Gingerbread still takes the lion’s share, according to a snapshot of data provided to Android developers.

Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) had about a 2.9 percent share and Honeycomb had more than a 3 percent share, according to Android Developers, which describes the data as “the relative number of active devices running a given version of the Android platform.”

Hot in the heels of the handset’s leaked details, big red just made the LG Lucid official. The modestly specked device will cost $79.99 (with 2-year contract), run Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and be powered by 1.2GHz dual-core processor with 1GB of RAM.

It took 15 days from release for iOS 5.1 to get to 61 percent, the same percentage of users as the most popular version of Android 2.3 ‘Gingerbread’.

Over-the-air (OTA) updates for iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad, combined with strong sales of Apple’s new iPad, have helped to drive up adoption of the latest 5.1 release, according to data released by iOS and Mac developer David Smith.

The number of Android devices running Ice Cream Sandwich is growing slowly, but the latest version of Google’s mobile OS is still only available on 1.12 percent of Android-based gadgets.

Mobile ad network Chitika examined the number of impressions it received in recent days and found that the most popular version of Android remains Gingerbread at 66.29 percent, followed by Froyo at 22.33 percent, and Eclair at 5.39 percent.

The Android Developers site has posted the latest data on devices running a given version of the Android OS, so let’s take a look at the last four months shall we? Ending on July 5th of this year Gingerbread was sitting at about 19%. In August, Gingerbread stepped up to about 24% and in September jumped up a bit more to 31%. Today Gingerbread is sitting at roughly 39% and though that’s almost a 10% increase from last month this needs to be higher. With Gingerbread out for almost a year now the carriers still are just not getting updates out as they should be, though it continues to get better. With Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nexus Prime right around the corner, that will be your best bet to make sure you’ll be on the most current version of Android from the start. It’s still a bit scary to think that the phone you buy may not see any Android OS updates for quite some time after a new OS is released. Hit up the break to see how all the versions stack up and don’t forget to hit us up in the comments. Do the masses really even care what Android OS version they are on or know which version they have?

Sprint Premier customers can snag it July 28. Sprint just dropped word that the long-awaited Motorola Photon 4G — the first Wimax device from Moto — will be available on July 31 for $199 on contract.