Shane Cole
New web traffic data suggests that the iPhone was Christmas's big winner among smartphones while the iPad remained the dominant tablet, though it lost some ground to competition from Samsung, Amazon, and Microsoft.
The study, conducted by web and advertising analytics firm Chitika, collated traffic statistics from "tens of millions" of U.S. and Canadian mobile devices across the company's network between Dec. 20 and Dec. 29. Data from the days immediately preceding Christmas was combined and compared to traffic from the days immediately following the holiday.
Apple's 1.8-percent gain in smartphone traffic represented the only increase among the handset vendors tracked in the study, with Motorola, HTC, LG, and Samsung all declining by between 0.1 and 0.8 percent. The iPhone was good for 54.3 percent of smartphone traffic, easily besting second-place Samsung's 23.7 percent.
It is unclear how much of the traffic was driven by Apple's newest flagship iPhone 5s and mid-range iPhone 5c as Chitika did not provide a more detailed breakdown, but the firm did say that the data indicates the "latest set of 5s and 5c devices remained a hit with consumers."
Roles were reversed in the tablet market as the iPad shed 1.3 percent of its traffic share, though it maintained a massive 76.1 percent of all tablet-originated traffic. Amazon's Kindle tablets were the biggest beneficiaries of the iPad's decline, clocking 9.4 percent of all logged tablet traffic, a 0.6-percent increase.
Microsoft, Samsung, and Google each picked up between 0.1 and 0.5 percent.
Though Apple holds more than three-quarters of all tablet traffic tracked by Chitika, the iPad's share is down nearly 10 percent compared to a July report from the firm which credited the iPad with 84.3 percent of tablet traffic.
Charles Martin
Malcolm Owen
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Andrew Orr
32 Comments
More good news which will be used to randomly punish Apple's stock.
This report is obviously a lie. People (including popular subgroups such as teens, elderly, etc) are running away from iOS! No 7" phone? No NFC? No curved screen? No waterproofing? Not even a stylus? Apple should get its act together!!! /s
hmm
As a Costco shopper, I noticed Samsung's tablets were prominently displayed near the entrance of the store where hundreds of shoppers would pass by every hour. I noticed there were substantial "immediate in-store rebates" offered to lower the MSRP of the Samsung tablets. If one wanted to make this purchase one would simply grab the proxy card and pick up the item when checking out. Apple is NOT sold at Costco because Apple won't (need to) slash the price to "wholesale". (Costco features all phones except the iPhone as well.). Also, at Amazon, iPads and iPhones are seemingly not particularly featured. In fact it seems to me to be quite the reverse. I'm sure both Costco and Amazon provided a substantial number of Samsung holiday sales. Many Costco shoppers are going to have a sophisticated understanding of the latest tech, but certainly not all. Plus many are just shopping for gifts and are putting price before high value and user experience IMO. I'm sure these two vendors added a lot of sales to Samsung's holiday numbers whereas Apple's products were not particularly represented this year.
By "Apple's 1.8-percent gain in smartphone traffic" you mean "Apple's 1.8 *percentage point* gain," right? This article seems to have been written by someone who didn't understand the difference.