The Christmas Phablet Trend
Every Christmas, the festive season has the largest amount of new device activations and app installations with people opening and using gifts, and this year saw the trend continue.
Interestingly over 50% of all new devices activated last week were Apple products, compared to just 17.7% for Samsung, and 5.8 percent for Nokia.
Other producers of smartphones including HTC, Huawei, and Xiaomi each acheived less than one percent share this Christmas Day, despite their large slices of the international smartphone market.
This can be attributed to their key markets being predominantly in Asia where this holiday is not typically a time for giving gifts.
Seasonal Success
The seasonal success for Apple was driven by the new iPhone 6 which was the number one device activated, and also it’s big brother the iPhone 6 Plus. The iPhone 6 Plus was among the top five activated devices this Christmas. Phablets continued to increase in popularity with consumers. The run up to Christmas saw phablets accounting for 13% of all new device activations, which is a huge increase from 2013 where just 4% of new activations were phablets.
No doubt the recent arrival of an iOS model is greatly helping the increase in phablet sales. The trend toward bigger smartphones has continued over the last 12 months. In January research suggested that phablets would exceed 120 million units within 3 years by 2018 – an increase from the previously estimated 20 million phablets shipped in 2016.
Some analysts predict that increasing sales of phablets will decrease tablet sales as users begin depending on a single mobile device. Sales of tablets and also smaller smartphones decreased as phablets became more popular.
The fortunate owners of new mobile devices were keen to download apps right away and Christmas was a bumper day for app installs with over 2.5 times the number of downloads seen earlier in December.
