It is not terribly surprising that oodles of new devices were opened up and activated on Christmas morning – in fact, we had three new iPhone 5 activations in our house alone! The site Flurry.com tracks and estimates the daily activations of iOS and Android devices, and is reporting that more than 17 million activations took place on December 25th alone.
As it is, 4 million combined smartphones and tablets is a HUGE number – and that is happening every day! Now think that on Christmas there were more than 4 TIMES that many activations … insane!
But wait – it gets even crazier. Take a look at how the ratio of tablets to smartphones activated on Christmas compares to the December baseline:
Think about it this way – on an average December day, there would be ~3.2 million iOS/Android phones activated and ~800k tablets. But on Christmas, there were ~8.9 million tablets activated compared to ~8.5 million smartphones. Or, while there was a 2.5x increase in smartphones, tablets increased by more than 11 times!
And as Flurry notes, the big winners were iPad, iPad Mini and Amazon (Kindle Fire). While I am sure that others saw moderate games, it is clear that only between 3 and 5 tablets sold more than a million ‘Christmas gift’ units, depending on how the Amazon sales broke down. Which brings me back to two things I have been saying for a year:
- It really is just an iPad and Kindle Fire world.
- Those numbers suggesting Samsung has anything above ~2% of the tablet market are PR fantasy (i.e. BS)
It is also a reminder of just WHY the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2 are so loaded with crapware – because ecosystems MATTER. Apple holds (by far) the #1 digital ecosystem, and Amazon holds pretty much everything else. Google Play moves loads of free downloads, but actually LOST revenue share while seeing huge download games in 2012.
Interesting stuff in these numbers, and I expect that as we get more details we will see even more cool trends. I don’t for a second think these are final or conclusive numbers, but do think they show just how massive the tablet market became this year.
What do you think about these numbers? Did you or anyone in your family get a smartphone or tablet this year?
Source: Flurry.com
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