14 DAY TRIAL // Christmas is the perfect time of the year to buy a new tablet or phone, so it was natural to expect an increase in device activations during the holiday.
And a study published by analytics firm Flurry Insights, which is owned by Yahoo, reveals that no less than 49.1 percent of the devices activated during the Christmas week were manufactured by Apple, while Samsung gets the second spot with 19.8 percent.
This is a decrease of 2.2 percent as compared to the previous year for Apple, the research shows, while, in Samsung’s case, it’s an increase of 2.1 percent, which was mainly driven by successful models such as the S6 and the S6 Edge+.
Microsoft very far behind
As far as Microsoft is concerned, which in the research is still called Nokia, it dropped from 5.8 percent to 2 percent, mostly because new devices such as Lumia 950 and 950 XL are still impacted by somewhat limited availability. What’s more, these are the only two Windows 10 Mobile devices currently available on the market, so buyers have only limited options for the moment.
Microsoft’s 2 percent score is very close to LG’s (1.7 percent) and Xiaomi’s (1.5 percent), with the Chinese company scoring an important increase this year.
“Sony fell out of the top five manufacturers all together, while Xiaomi made the cut for the first time with 1.5% of all new activations during Christmas week. This is especially striking since Christmas is not the biggest gifting day of the year in China, and makes Xiaomi’s rumored US-entry next year even more exciting,” the research mentions.
As far as Apple is concerned, it’s not yet known how many iPhone units got sold during the holidays, but Flurry Insights claims phablets (the iPhone 6s Plus) accounted for 12 percent of the sales while medium phones, most likely the iPhone 6s, represented the dominant form factor with 65 percent.
