According to mobile metrics firm Flurry Analytics, as many as 6.8 million people activated their Apple and Android devices on December 25, the Christmas Day --- with the figures marking a more than two-fold increase from the 2.5 million devices which were fired up on the same day in 2010.

As per Flurry Analytics - which keeps track of activity from 140,000 apps -, during the days prior to Christmas, the daily activations of the Apple iPhones and Android-based handsets touched nearly 1.5 million.

However, on the Christmas Day itself, the activations of the Apple and Android devices witnessed a whopping 350 percent increase to 6.8 million, going by the Flurry Analytics statistics.

The download of apps on the Christmas Day started soaring at around 6 a. m., and; all through the day, they remained notably high. They peaked out at almost 8 p. m.; with approximately 15 million apps being downloaded during the two hours from 7 p. m. to 9 p. m, if all the time zones of the world are lined up.

Even though Flurry Analytics which stopped short of disclosing whether Apple's share of the total Christmas Day activations was more than that of the Android, it did mention that December 25 capped off a robust year for both iOS and Android. While the Apple App Store is apparently on track to record 10 billion downloads for 2011 alone; the Android Market has gone past the `10 billion downloads' milestone overall this month!