This Holiday Season

Apple once again dominated the market share of newly activated devices after earning 49.1 percent of the pie.

The latest report was released by Flurry, a mobile analytics company that is run by Yahoo. According to the company, Apple has once again occupied the top spot although its percentage points dropped as much as 2.2 percent from last year’s recorded market share of 51.3 percent.

The report also showed that consumers are becoming increasingly interested in phablets because of their large screen as compared to medium phones. This year, phablets made up 27 percent of the newly activated devices during the week leading to Christmas. Such percentage is more than twice the recorded 13 percent in 2014 and almost 7 times the 4 percent that was recorded in 2013.

“In the early days it appeared that phablets were stealing share from tablets, with tablet share decreasing from 17 percent in 2013 to 11 percent [in] 2014,” said Flurry. “For the first time in 2015 though, it appears consumers are opting for phablets – not instead of a tablet – but instead of a smaller-sized phone.”

Among all the devices of Apple, it is the larger 5.5-inch iPhone 6s Plus which makes up 12 percent of activations done on all Apple devices during the same holiday shopping period. Flurry said that consumers’ preference to Apple’s phablet came at the expense of “medium phones.” These include the iPhone 6s which has a 4.7-inch display and small tablets such as the iPad mini. The latter, so far, accounts for 9 percent of all the activations done on iOS devices.

This means that phablets this year “eat up” the smaller smartphones, which is in stark contrast to previous years when phablets would “devour” the share away from tablets.

It would be interesting to know how Apple’s phablet will perform in the coming year considering the fact that the company only introduced its first phablet devices in September 2014.

Samsung came in second and occupied 19.8 percent of the newly activated devices during the same period. The company enjoyed a 2.1 percent increase from last year’s 17.7 percent, which can be attributed to the Galaxy S6, Core Prime and the new Galaxy Grand Prime.

Nokia, LG and Xiaomi managed to round up the top five in the list after earning 2.0 percent, 1.7 percent and 1.5 percent respectively. While this is the first time for Xiaomi to make it into the list, this year also saw how Sony lost its spot among the top five smartphone makers.