Phablets—the dimension-ambiguous members of the device community—made their presence known during the week leading up to Christmas, the biggest time of the year for phone activations. Phablets accounted for 27% of them, according to Flurry, more than double the 13% they represented during Christmas Week 2014. Most of the pickup in volume came at the expense of medium-size phones, which fell to 54% of activations from 63% last year.
Androids are driving phablet growth, noted Flurry, Yahoo’s app developer and tracker of some 780,000 mobile device apps. Fully half of Android devices activated last week were phablets, as opposed to only 12% of iOS activations. Flurry credits the new iPhone 6s Plus entry from Apple, which just entered the phablet category last year, with adding to last week’s surprising numbers.
Apple won the week in overall activations, scoring 49% of them. It was followed by Samsung (19.8%), Nokia (2%), LG (1.7%), and Xiaomi (1.5%). The numbers reflect a two-point gain in Christmas Week share for Samsung at the expense of Apple.
As always, December 25 was the biggest day of the year for app developers. More than twice as many were downloaded that day than on an average day in December.
