Tablet Phone: Kindle Fire and Surface gain market share post-Christmas, but iPad rules the roost

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Kindle Fire and Surface gain market share post-Christmas, but iPad rules the roost - GeekWire

January 2, 2014 at 12:28 pm by Blair Hanley Frank

prod_surface2_Web It seems like the tablet-owning public woke up to a bunch of Microsoft Surfaces and Amazon Kindle Fires under their trees Christmas morning.

Microsoft and Amazon saw the biggest gains in post-Christmas tablet browsing, with Amazon taking up 9.4 percent of the market, and Microsoft rising to 2.3 percent of the market, bringing it ahead of Google's tablet browser share, according to new numbers released today by online advertising network Chitika.

Apple remained the king of the tablet browsing hill in Chitika's analysis, capturing 76.1 percent of browser activity, which is 1.3 percentage points below what it had before the holiday season.

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That's big news, especially for Microsoft, which is trying to continue the expansion of its devices and services division as it works to bring Nokia's hardware business under its roof. It also means that Amazon's Kindle Fire tablets continue to perform well over the holidays, though it's not clear whether this year's release of the Kindle Fire HDX will help Amazon's tablet line break out of the extreme seasonality that has caused some pundits to coin it the fruitcake of tablets.

It probably helped matters that picking up just about any other tablet on the market is cheaper than purchasing a comparably equipped iPad, which may have swayed holiday shoppers looking to put a tablet in the hands of their loved ones without breaking the bank.

Still, the holiday season held some good news for Apple. The company saw a 1.8 percent bump in its share of the mobile browsing market (below), making it the only company to gain mobile browser share after Christmas as consumers opened new iPhones.

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Blair Hanley Frank is GeekWire's Bay Area Correspondent. He has also worked for Macworld, PCWorld and TechHive. He can be found on Twitter @belril and can be reached by email at blair@geekwire.com.