More than half the new mobile devices activated during the week leading up to Christmas Day were from Apple, according to a study by mobile analytics company Flurry.
Apple made 51.3 percent of the devices activated from Dec. 19 to Dec. 25, which typically sees the highest number of new device activations and app installs all year in the U.S. Samsung devices represented 17.7 percent of activations, Microsoft’s Nokia devices had 5.8 percent, Sony had 1.6 percent and LG had 1.4 percent.
Up-and-coming mobile phone vendors Xiaomi (now the biggest-selling phone maker in China), Huawei, and HTC all had less than 1 percent share on Christmas Day. One likely reason: Their greatest popularity is in Asian markets where Dec. 25 is not the biggest gift-giving day of the year.
Christmas 2014 also saw a big jump in the number of phablets activated. In the week leading up to Christmas, 13 percent of new device activations were phablets, compared to 4 percent in 2013, while full-size tablets dropped to 11 percent from 17 percent of devices activated.
All other device types (small tablets and small and medium-size phones) dropped only slightly from 2013. But while phablets may be growing fastest, medium-size phones are still overwhelmingly the most popular: They represented 64 percent of the devices activated at Christmas time.
