The Christmas spike in smartphone and tablet activations, as well as app downloads, is now well known. But the figures emerging from Christmas 2012 are still startling for their sheer scale.

We’ll start with Flurry, which has been publishing some stats based on the 260k apps running its analytics tools. It estimates that more than 50m iOS and Android devices were activated in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, with 17.4m of them activated on Christmas Day alone.

Meanwhile, Flurry also estimates that 1.76bn iOS and Android apps were downloaded in that final week of 2012, compared to a weekly average of 1.07bn earlier in December. But figures for WhatsApp, Minecraft, BBC iPlayer, Storm8 and Temple Run provide more depth on the festive spike.

Start with messaging app WhatsApp, which says it processed 18bn messages on 31 December alone thanks to the New Year festivities. TheNextWeb compares this to Apple’s (non New Year’s Eve) numbers showing its iMessage generates around 1bn messages a day, to show the scale.

Christmas was big for mobile gaming too. Imangi Studios’ Keith Shepherd tweeted that Temple Run was downloaded 1m times on iOS, 1m on Android and another 500k on Amazon’s app store on Christmas Day alone – 2.5m downloads for the day.

Mojang’s Markus ‘Notch’ Persson had his own tweet noting that Minecraft sold 453k copies on 24 December, although that’s all platforms – PC and Mac as well as mobile. This followed an announcement earlier in the month that Minecraft had passed the 5m sales mark on iOS and Android.

Social games publisher Storm8 also published its Christmas stats: 2m game downloads on Christmas Day alone, four times its average Tuesday total. People spent 2.5m hours playing Storm8′s games that day, but more importantly for its business, its ARPDAU (average revenue per daily active user) increased by up to 4.5 times in some of Storm8′s most popular games.

(Note ‘up to’ and ‘some of’ in that sentence – this wasn’t an across-the-board rise or an average for all the company’s games, but it’s still notable.)

Finally, the BBC has published some numbers for its iPlayer catch-up service, noting 77m requests for TV and radio programmes between 22 December and 1 January, with mobile and tablet requests up 40% and 66% on Christmas Day compared to Christmas Eve.

“During the whole festive period the iPlayer app was downloaded nearly one million times – with almost 300,000 downloads on Christmas Day alone,” blogs iPlayer head Dave Price. “By the end of 2012 the iPlayer app had been downloaded nearly 13 million times.”